Requirements for bulk email senders by Google and Yahoo

In 2024 Google and Yahoo anounced they'll enforce the following requirements for bulk email senders. The requirements are not new; they were already best practices for a while now. They are being enforced to prevent recipients from getting spam and harmful messages, and also to protect email senders from getting spoofed and getting their domains abused. The aim is to have a better user experience by delivering only wanted and safe emails.

What makes me a bulk email sender?

A bulk sender is any email sender that sends close to 5,000 messages or more to personal accounts in a day. Messages sent from the same primary domain count toward the 5,000 limit. Please note, there's no fixed limit of emails; if you're bulk sending, that will be detected, you likely can't avoid being labelled a bulk sender by sending 4,999 daily messages.
Once Google or Yahoo classified you as a bulk sender, it's a permanent status, it won't change by changing email sending habits.

Requirements for Bulk Senders:

As a bulk email sender you'll need to respect the requirements below, to ensure your emails are delivered and they won't end up in your recipient's spam folder.

• Authenticate your mail
  • Implement both SPF & DKIM and publish a valid DMARC policy, here is our help article with more info this.
  • This will make sure that your domain can't be abused by spammers or scammers.
• Add one-click unsubscribe links to your promotional emails
  • One-click unsubscribe is required only for marketing and promotional messages. Transactional messages are excluded from this requirement.
  • Please note: the unsubscribe link has to meet RFC 8058 requirements. You can include other unsubscrible links in your email too, but if you're experiencing email delivery issues, you won't be eligible for mitigation without compliant unsubscribe links in your emails.
  • Unwanted messages that don’t use one-click unsubscribe are more likely to be reported as spam by recipients.
  • Close has this feature built-in, see how to add the unsubscribe links here.
• Keep your spam rate low
  • Spam rate is calculated by each email provider as the ratio of emails reported as spam by their users versus emails from you delivered to their users.
  • You'll want to keep this rate below 0.1% as this can already have a negative effect on your deliverability, and you'll definitely want to keep it under 0.3%.
  • Bulk senders will only be eligible for mitigation by Google when their spam rates remain below 0.3% for 7 consecutive days.
  • Using the unsubscribe feaure in Close will help you to only send emails to your prospects that are interested and it makes it less likely to get spam reports.
  • You can check your spam rates in Google by using Google's Postmaster Tools, they also have help docs on how to set this up. For Yahoo, sign up for the Complaint Feedback Loop and monitor complaints received against mail sent to Yahoo domains.

Transactional emails

Transactional messages are for example: password reset messages, reservation confirmations, and form submission confirmations. They don't have to include a one-click unsubscribe link. Google and Yahoo will not categorize these, it is up to you what you define as transactional email. Please note: if people start reporting it as spam, your spam rate will go up.

Some good practices to follow:

• Don't send bulk/marketing email from the same IPs you use to send user mail, transactional mail, alerts, etc.
• Each IP and DKIM domain has a reputation, which can impact the delivery of your email.
• By segregating your email according to function, you help ensure that your mail receives the best delivery possible.

More information

You can check out Google's and Yahoo's requirements and FAQ-s on the links.