Google recently announced some changes to its email service in regards to what it will consider spam and how it will handle those emails. Yahoo mail has followed suit. And while both services are billing this as a new for 2024 feature–and it’s true that their implementation of this as an anti-spam measure is new–the best practices they’re recommending have been suggested for quite a while. Are you ready? Is your email marketing service ready?
First, the changes will affect only senders who send at least 5000 emails in a day, so unless you have a larger email list, you may not be affected. That doesn’t mean you can’t already implement these changes and improve your email deliver-ability. (This means a better chance of hitting the “inbox” tab on gmail rather than the promotions tab.)
You will need to have a verified email sending domain (this usually includes adding some records to your email’s DNS), a DMARC record (this is one of those records you add), and you’ll need to keep those spam complaints below 0.3%, so make sure you’re only using reliable methods to build your email newsletter. It’s beyond the scope of this article for me to talk about how to do these things here–but as an author technologist this is something I like helping people with, so if you need help reach out! Some newsletter providers (including our own Epona Mail service) have already complied with this or put in ways for newsletter senders to comply with it. You’ll need to speak with your service directly to find out more.
In the past many newsletter providers have taken proactive steps to help ensure your emails get where they need to go. These additional steps are required by the senders because it’s easy for anyone to sign up for a newsletter service. By making the senders incorporate a few extra settings in their DNS and having a verified domain, it helps ensure that your emails are coming from you, and they’ll get into your receiver’s inbox.
This is the type of work I love to do as an author technologist, so reach out if you have questions or would like to learn more about Epona Mail.
