Author: Alex Attarian, Group Product Manager, Marketing Pro
As you have probably heard, both Gmail and Yahoo are imposing new requirements starting February 1st, 2024 for email senders. What was once considered a good practice is now becoming mandatory to reach Gmail and Yahoo email subscribers.
Why These Changes?
The new requirements that both Gmail and Yahoo announced recently are actually nothing new. Many senders in the email marketing industry have been following these requirements as a gold standard for a long time, and have been compliant for years. Rest assured, the ServiceTitan Marketing Pro platform has also implemented these authentication requirements as a gold standard before they became mandatory.
What Gmail and Yahoo are doing now is making those recommendations from prior years a requirement to reach their email users. This is a good thing for the industry. It will force senders to properly authenticate their emails, maintain good marketing strategies, and care for the end user.
Both Gmail and Yahoo are doing this to protect their users not only from unwanted spam but also from phishing and scamming attacks. Going forward with these new requirements, bad senders cannot impersonate domains that don’t belong to them to trick users into opening emails and clicking fraudulent links.
What Is Changing?
5 Critical Requirements
Both Gmail and Yahoo now require senders to meet the following 5 requirements to be compliant:
- Authenticating your emails using DKIM, SPF, and DMARC
- ServiceTitan has you already covered in this area. We have been using the proper authentication for years and followed industry standards before they actually became requirements.
- Maintaining a spam complaint rate under 0.3% (ideally around 0.1%)
- This is something that you as a customer are in control of and need to be mindful of. Sending emails to old customers or customers who churned a long time ago and have lost interest in your company could be a bad idea and increase the chances that they might report you as spam.
- Sending automated emails to your recent customers or customers who engaged with you recently either by calling, requesting an estimate, or scheduling a job is a good way to target your engaged customers and reduce spam complaints.
- Allowing your subscribers to unsubscribe with a single click
- ServiceTitan has you already covered for this. The unsubscribe links that you can include in your emails already allow customers to unsubscribe with a single click.
- Additionally, we are working on including the same links in the email headers for all email providers to process those more easily. Please read more about this requirement below.
- Sending IPs having proper DNS records
- ServiceTitan has you already covered for this. We have always maintained proper DNS records for all of our sending IPs and have been compliant since the beginning of Marketing Pro.
- Use a TLS connection for transmitting email
- ServiceTitan has you already covered for this. Our sending infrastructure has been using proper and secure TLS connections with email providers to send emails securely.
How Will These Changes Be Rolled Out
While Yahoo has indicated that sender authentication requirements (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) will be enforced starting February 2024, Gmail is going a bit differently about it. In a recent webinar hosted by Twilio, Gmail’s Group Product Manager Neil Kumaran clarified that the rollout will be gradual, starting in February.
At first, Gmail will reject out-of-compliance messages with a warning and then accept the message upon a retry. Over the next few months, Gmail will then start increasing the % of rejection warnings, and after some time those rejections will become permanent until the sender is compliant with the authentication requirements.
As mentioned above, there should not be a significant impact in early February. However, as stricter rejection policies roll out, the impact will become more noticeable in the later months after February.
One important thing to note is that both Gmail and Yahoo have delayed the enforcement of the one-click unsubscribe requirement until June 2024.
If you are a Marketing Pro customer and are using one of our shared domains, servicetitanmail.io or stsend4.io, you are already in compliance because we have already done all the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentications for you.
If you are using your own domain for sending purposes and have gone through the process of setting it up in the past with our support team, it should already have the right authentication configured. However, our team will be going through all the custom domains and notify the customers who are not in compliance and provide instructions to fix it.
If you do not receive any communication from us about your sender domain, then you are already in full compliance and there is no action needed from you.
Note:
Properly authenticated emails should look like this, all 3 authentication parts (DKIM, SPF and DMARC should show pass)
Questions? Leave in the comments below.
