Ensuring the emails our customers send are actually delivered to their recipients is one of our top priorities. We are always watching our email systems and evaluating ways to ensure our clients receive the absolute best email delivery rates possible.
Recently, two of the world's largest email providers, Google and Yahoo, announced they will soon require email senders to comply with more stringent email authentication policies—senders not in compliance with the new requirements will see issues getting their emails delivered in 2024.
The good news is that for the vast majority of i7MEDIA customers, there's nothing anyone needs to do to ensure emails are delivered to Google and Yahoo once these rules take effect. We've already been compliant with the rules for years. Additionally, we welcome these new requirements because we have tried to enforce them on emails being sent to our customers in the past but have not been able to because the "big guys" weren't doing it causing our customers to believe our systems weren't working properly. So, we're pretty excited about these changes as they will help us protect our customers Inboxes.
Google and Yahoo have good reason to change the rules for email senders
Properly authenticating emails has been a best practice for a long time, but most providers haven't bothered to ensure their services are using the tools available to protect their emails. That’s a major problem: If emails aren't properly authenticated, it is incredibly easy for bad actors to impersonate domains and to send phishing attacks—that will damage an entire domains sending reputation.
We are focused on protecting our users from spam and unwanted emails, but if other senders fail to properly secure their systems and leave their customers wide open to exploitation, that job is incredibly difficult. Gmail and Yahoo have finally decided that proper email authentication and following deliverability best practices are no longer a nice-to-have (THANK YOU!). To ensure our clients emails continue to make it to the inbox, we have to comply with key best practices for email authentication and spam prevention. That means:
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Authenticating your emails using DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
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Reducing spam and maintaining a spam complaint rate under 0.3%.
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Allowing people to unsubscribe by clicking just one link, and honor unsubscribes within two days.
We handle this automatically for our customers on our "professional" email service plans.
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RFC 5322 compliance, PTR records, rDNS
We have our customers covered here.
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Making sure your sending server IP addresses have valid reverse DNS records.
We have our customers covered here.
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Use a TLS connection for transmitting email.
We have supported opportunistic TLS for all outbound email since we first started hosting email, ensuring messages are encrypted in transit.
These changes benefit all of us
While these new requirements primarily target large bulk senders (many requirements will only apply to high-volume senders who send more than 5,000 emails a day). For smaller senders (most of our clients) sending mostly transactional email (not newsletters), there is less of a chance you're going to be impacted by the changes—but you can't ignore them.
We know from experience that these requirements will likely apply to all senders in the future. Besides, who would want to run their business in a "sort of compliant” and haphazard manner?
So, whether our clients send just a few emails a day or a few million an hour, protecting their domains, avoiding spam, and following deliverability standards is top priority for us to keep our clients safe and their email delivered reliably.
What our clients can expect
For most of our clients, you can just expect to have your email delivered as always. For some, you will hear from us asking you to create some DNS records (DKIM, DMARC, SPF) or give us temporary access so we can create these records. That's it. We'll handle the rest and that's not much because we've always done this for customers who host their DNS with us and we've always tried to get it done for those who do not.
If you have any trouble with your email or questions about this article and the new requirements, please contact us as we'd be very happy to help you out. If your email provider isn't responsive, hasn't bothered implementing these changes, or doesn't have U.S.-based support, those are all really good reasons to give us a shout!