The new 2024 email sending requirements for Google and Yahoo (collectively being called "Yahoogle", we guess that's their celebrity couple name) are causing a lot of concern among email senders, but they needn't. In fact, the odds are good that you are already doing everything that you need to, or, if you aren't, you already know that you should be. The bottom line is that the general requirements are simply: Have proper authentication set up (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC - yes, all three), have the required one-click unsubscribe link in your headers in all of your bulk email, and keep your spam complaint rate down in the negligible zone (more on that later).
Microsoft will start honoring p=reject DMARC policies for incoming email which does not pass a DMARC check when the associated DMARC record designates a policy of p=reject. This affects inbound messages at Microsoft Outlook email addresses, Microsoft Hotmail email addresses, Microsoft Live email addresses, and MSN email addresses.
Of the current email authentication mechanisms, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, DKIM seems to be the most confusing for people (this is why we offer a human-powered DKIM checker, contact us for a free DKIM check). What is a DKIM selector? What are the DKIM tags? How does one create a DKIM record? Is there a good DKIM record generator? Here is a plain English explanation of DKIM, and a breakdown of the anatomy of a DKIM record.
Hopefully by now you have read our article about what the big Yahoo DMARC p=reject rejection means for you and your email. And you may or may not be aware that yesterday AOL did the exact same thing, also publishing a DMARC policy of p=reject, which means, essentially, "reject any email coming from a yahoo.com or aol.com address if it was not sent through a Yahoo or AOL mail server."
Do you know what your DMARC policy is, or if you even have a DMARC record? Of the authentication mechanisms (DMARC, SPF, DKIM) SPF and DKIM are important resources to authenticate different aspects of your email flow, but it's important to have a DMARC record stating your DMARC policy as well. This is because your DMARC policy (contained in your DMARC record which is a text record within your DNS records) tells email receivers what they should do with email that claims to be from you but that fails SPF and/or DKIM.
One of the most important things that you can do to ensure good email deliverability is to add email deliverability test accounts to your mailing list. Fortunately, adding deliverability test accounts is also one of the easiest things that you can do! You should do this by creating one or more test accounts with each of the major free webmail hosts, such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. You can do this by using your "company name" as your standard email deliverability test account name.
We've heard a lot about whitelisting and blacklisting, but many are unfamiliar with the term "greylisting" and, to a lesser extent, "rate limiting." Greylisting and rate limiting are two additional but lesser used methods which some ISPs may employ to attempt to deal with spam and/or a sudden influx of bulk email.
We wanted to do a mid-year check-in to remind you to make sure that your emailing practices are staying in tip-top shape, and that your email marketing campaigns were minding their p's and q's to ensure maximum deliverability.
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