Google‘s new email sender guidelines

Welcome to our deep dive on new email-sending requirements.

You probably already know that Google and Yahoo’s new requirements for email senders have now rolled out, as of February 1 2024.

We’ve been helping some organizations prepare, and as the new policies go into effect, we wanted to share some notes on what we know, what we don’t know, and what you can do if you’re concerned about how the new requirements will impact your deliverability.

The published documentation here is often a little vague about both what you need to do and what will happen if you don’t — probably intentionally, since Google doesn’t want bad actors to be able to game their systems.

We dug into the very fine grained specifics of what Google does & doesn’t say and how those details interact with CRM functionality, and we’ve collected all of that in this series so that you don’t have to go down the same rabbit holes we did.

We’ve broken this down into a few posts filled with details:

Post One: An Introduction to Google‘s New Email Sender Guidelines — in this post, we cover what the requirements actually are, whether they will affect you (hint: they will), and what the consequences are of getting this wrong (not great, but somewhat gradual)
Post Two: Reading The Tea Leaves — What does Google actually say about any of this? We look closely at how Google defines what is and isn’t going into ‘user-reported spam rates’ along with what they mean by key terms like ‘active recipient‘s inbox’, ‘total daily volume’, and ‘user-reported spam’. Also covered: ‘what even is a day’?
Post Three: Tracking your spam complaints (or “Why you‘ll need to trust Postmaster Tools“) — Google does things differently and corrals all info about spam reports into Postmaster Tools. In this post, we explain what that means and give some guidance on how to decipher those tools and they will and won’t tell you.

And, coming soon:

In Post Four, we‘ll walk through how you can combine the numbers available in your CRM or bulk mailing platform with Postmaster Tools‘s statistics, to get a fuller picture of what is going on with your mail program. It is not at all straightforward, so we‘ll help to piece it together.
In Post Five, we‘ll cover what changes you might need to make to my program — realistically. In this post, we‘ll reiterate some general deliverability best practices to remind you of what you should already have in place, and then move on to talk about how we‘d recommend structuring sends for at least the next few months as the details for all of this get more clear. We‘ll also give some guidance about keeping risk levels low when you want to send mail to less-engaged users.

Why have you done this?

Honestly, at this moment, we maybe wish we hadn‘t? Getting really into this swallowed up a lot of work time over the past few months! But when we searched around for a “what does it all mean” guide, we just couldn’t find one.

Many people we respect in the advocacy space are really concerned about how Google’s ambiguous changes and enforcement might seriously hurt their work. They are generally trying to do the right thing in terms of how & to whom they send messages, but they are worried that technicalities will have drastic — and not appealable — consequences for their ability to send email.

But it’s far from simple to understand those technicalities and the ins-and-outs of what Google means and what preliminary precautions can and should be taken. We’ve taken a stab at that in this series, based on what we know now, what we‘ve read & heard from others‘ guides, posts, and podcasts, and what Google currently has posted in its relevant documentation.

We expect to circle back to this topic in future posts as we learn more about what these new requirements mean in practice. We hope you’ll follow along! And if you know something we’re personally still stumped by, or if you think we’re misinterpreting what we’re reading, we’d welcome your feedback and corrections in the comments. Excited to discuss!