An introduction to Google‘s new email sender guidelines

Who these guides are for

We’re writing this series primarily for organizations that send 1,000 to 100,000 mails in a single day.

Many organizations with that volume also don’t actually send large mailings every day.

If you’re sending fewer than 1,000 messages to opted-in users on your busiest days, you probably don’t have much wiggle room to adjust your sending practices in preparation for these new guidelines, beyond the core must-haves of respecting opt-ins and unsubscribes. But if your list is in this ballpark, you hopefully have a pretty direct relationship with your recipients, which should minimize the risks.¹

If you’re a very large volume sender on a single domain, you probably don’t need these posts (unless you too are thrilled by documentation hermeneutics and deliverability minutia) — you’re probably already keeping day-to-day spam rates low on consistent volume. Can’t hurt to double check, though!

What these guides are about

We‘re focusing pretty much exclusively on Google‘s new guidelines. Yahoo‘s new guidelines are
essentially the same. Over time other mailbox providers are likely to follow Google‘s lead here, whether or not that includes public guidelines of their own.

Specifically, we‘ll be primarily focusing here on the newly-published spam rate requirement, because … yikes! It turns out that if you‘re not sending a lot of mail every single day, then staying around 0.1% spam complaints and always under 0.3% can be tough.

What to do first

The straightforward part first: if you haven’t already set up DMARC with a “none” policy, you should do this immediately². This is easy to do and is documented here. When you’re ready to learn more about a full DMARC rollout with enforcement, we’ve written more about how to do this here.

There are several other technical requirements like SPF, DKIM, PTR records, TLS, and one-click unsubscribe³. Most of these are likely already being handled correctly by your bulk mailing tools, and you probably configured the rest of them back when you got started with your bulk mailer. Feel free to contact us if you’d like a second pair of eyes on it.

Then, sign up for Google Postmaster Tools. This allows you to monitor your user-reported spam rates from Gmail recipients. As soon as you’ve set this up, you should start looking at their handy dashboard of spam rates per day, because Google has published this new requirement:

Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher.

In this series, we’ll be focusing on what exactly this means, how Google Postmaster Tools is reporting on it, how to interpret what you’re seeing, and what you should be doing about it.

Does this even apply to me?

It does.

Before we dig into the details, let’s step back.

Are these new guidelines relevant to your organization? And what are the consequences of ignoring them?

Google has published two sets of guidelines, one that pertains to “all senders who send email to Gmail accounts” and another for “senders who send 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail accounts.”

The latter is Google’s published definition of a bulk sender. If you send 5,000 or more messages in a single day to Gmail accounts, Google considers you a bulk sender.

Note that this 5,000-message-per-day threshold applies across all sending platforms, all IP addresses, all From: addresses, and all subdomains listed under your primary domain.

So if your organization sends mail to external recipients from a combination of Action Network / ActionKit / EveryAction / Engaging Networks / Luminate, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Mailchimp, and Quorum, using a variety of senders including jill@yourdomain.org, info@mail.yourdomain.org, and development@yourdomain.org — those will all count toward determining whether you’re a bulk sender, and you’ll need to keep an eye on sending practices and spam rates across all of them.

Sometimes I send 10,000 messages in a day to Gmail accounts, but I only really send bulk mail once or twice a month. Most days I send ten messages — or none. Does this really still apply to me?

Google says yes. Once you’ve ever reached the threshold, your domain is considered a bulk sender forever, and you then need to adhere to their bulk sender requirements forever:

Bulk sender status doesn’t have an expiration date. Email senders that have been classified as bulk senders are permanently classified as such. Changes in email sending practices will not affect permanent bulk sender status once it’s assigned.

What if I’m completely confident that my organization has never sent more than 4,999 emails in a single day to Gmail accounts?

You still need to adhere to these guidelines! The Humans of Martech point out that Google’s new spam rate threshold is actually for all senders who send to Gmail accounts – not just bulk senders.⁴

Does that mean I need to keep my daily spam rate under 0.30% even on days when I send ten mails?

We’re skeptical — we suspect that low-volume days matter a lot less to Google than high-volume days. We also suspect that they’ll be looking at patterns across a rolling several-day window when enforcing this requirement.

But that’s entirely a common-sense guess on our part. If you want to err on the side of caution and interpret their guidelines literally, you will indeed want to avoid ever reaching a spam rate of 0.30% in a single day, even a very low-volume day.

What are the consequences?

In general, you should take this seriously. Google says:

If senders don’t meet these requirements, messages might be rejected or delivered to recipients’ spam folders.

So, in the long term, if you consistently or repeatedly fail to adhere to Google’s new recommended spam rates, it’s very likely that all your emails – even the ones you’re sending from your personal Google Workspace account(!!!) – will go straight to recipients’ spam folders unseen, or get rejected by Google altogether.

However, Google says that consequences will be somewhat gradual:

In April 2024, we’ll start rejecting a percentage of non-compliant email traffic, and we’ll gradually increase the rejection rate. For example, if 75% of a sender’s traffic meets our requirements, we’ll start rejecting a percentage of the remaining 25% of traffic that isn’t compliant.⁵

So you shouldn’t think of this as an all-or-nothing situation. If your user-reported spam rates are too high, then gradually more of your mail will start landing in spam folders. If you’re keeping an eye on your performance metrics, you should have some opportunity to mitigate. Essentially this is the same pattern of deliverability practices as it always was, just more formally codified.

Also – we think it’s fairly likely that Google will be looking at trends over the course of a few days or weeks at a time, and putting those data points in the broader context of your historical sending patterns — rather than immediately starting to slam the door on your mails if you hit a 0.31% spam rate one day. Again, though, we’re just guessing here until there‘s some real-world evidence!

Today is February 6, and Postmaster Tools already says I had a 1% spam rate yesterday. Am I already doomed?

Don’t panic! Strict enforcement of these new guidelines will not actually commence until April, and still won’t be all-or-nothing:

In February 2024, bulk senders who don’t meet sender requirements will start getting temporary errors (with error codes) on a small percentage of their non-compliant email traffic. These temporary errors are meant to help senders identify email traffic that doesn’t meet our guidelines so that senders can resolve issues that result in non-compliance.

In April 2024, we’ll start rejecting a percentage of non-compliant email traffic, and we’ll gradually increase the rejection rate.

This means that if Google thinks your traffic is already problematic, they’ll start by warning you. That warning will take the form of a “temporary error” which means:

• A small percentage of mail you send to Google will not reach the recipient’s inbox right away
• Instead, Google will tell the sender “we rejected this message [as suspected spam / because of an invalid configuration / some other reason]”
• Your sending software will see that the rejection was temporary, so it’s allowed to re-try the message
• Your sending software will then resend the message automatically after a brief waiting period, and Google will likely deliver it this second time around

How do I know if I have a problem?

In addition to monitoring your daily spam rate in Google Postmaster Tools, you can and should keep an eye out for these temporary errors, which will tell you if Google wants you to lower your spam rate.

These warnings should show up in your bulk mailing platform as a higher-than-usual soft bounce rate, temporary failure rate, or delay rate.

You can also view the warnings in Google Postmaster Tools under the “Delivery Errors” tab:

If you start to see these sorts of errors frequently, or on a high percentage of your daily mail volume, you should take steps to lower your spam rate and improve your sending practices.

You should also continue to use the signals you’ve always used to monitor deliverability in your bulk mailing toolsets, like open & click rates creeping downward.

What does any of this actually mean? What does Google mean by “user-reported spam rates?” How do they measure this, and how can I find out more about what is happening to my mail?

We tackle that next!