Gmail and Yahoo Sender Requirements

Gmail and Yahoo: New deliverability requirements in 2024

On 3rd October 2023, Google and Yahoo announced the newly updated sender requirements for those who send mail to Gmail or Yahoo Mail successfully and in volume. Marcel Becker from Yahoo and Neil Kumaran from Google have explained in detail what senders will have to do if they don’t want to find their mail blocked at either mailbox provider. They warn that failure to comply to the requirements will result in rejected mails in early 2024.

These new requirements have been “best practice” recommendations for a long time; so these are more like “documenting what everybody knows” and laying the groundwork for reasoned, documented policy-based blocking of non-conforming mail.

Those requirements are:

  1. Authenticate email. We were moving to a point where you basically already had to authenticate your email messages if you wanted inbox placement success; now it’s fair to say that it is indeed required if you want to get your mail delivered. This shouldn’t be too hard for most; marketers using just about any platform should be able to implement DKIM using their own domain name. As I said, it was already a best practice.
  2. Make it VERY easy to unsubscribe. Sending platforms/apps implement list-unsubscribe. If you still haven’t implemented list-unsusbcribe-post (as defined in RFC 8058), it is now highly essential. Make sure messages have a clear and easy unsubscribe link in the body as well.
  3. Ensure that you’re sending wanted mail. This means to keep spam complaint rates low. Google is warning that high spam complaint rates will now result in blocking. Yahoo Mail were already blocking some mails based on an elevated complaint rate. This can be an adjustment to that policy or just that they are elucidating this policy so that it is more broadly understood.

And you can read it yourself, straight from Google and Yahoo:

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