Tighter Gmail authentication requirements deadline – April 2024. That’s now!

But you might say — it only applies to bulk senders sending over 5000 emails within 24 hours. Oh and it only applies to personal Gmail addresses.

Why not take the smart read on this – run with the “canary in the coal mine” advice. Which goes like this. Read the writing on the wall, bulk senders today, the rest of us soon enough.

Read between the lines. You can bet Google implies:

→ Compliance with email security best practice is a really (really) good idea now.

→ Email authentication compliance will be non-negotiable soon anyway.

So I’d get email compliance up to speed NOW, in preparation for the predictable future announcements to comply with best practice email security measures.

More importantly I have a better reason to be scrutinizing my SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (and ARC headers if mailing-list emails) records config now.

Because security 🙂.

Why wait to review your email authentication until you have to? Get it tight now…

There are important tips to pickup in Google’s Email Send Guidelines FAQ.

Such as…

It’s not 5000 messages from any sub-domain, it’s from the primary domain. So don’t be thinking you can add a hostname in front of your primary domain to create multiple sending domains and then send over 5000 messages.

Here’s a big one. Once a bulk sender always a bulk sender. Send over 5000 messages ONCE. That’s it in Google’s eyes. For that domain you are permanently flagged a bulk sender. Which is fine if you allocate your domain for this purpose. Just saying.

Google’s mitigation recourse option will be unavailable for 7 consecutive days from June 2024 after resolving user-reported spam rates over 0.3%. Get spam under 0.3% and you still have to wait for 7 days before Google will help you.

Buried further down in their Sender Guidelines Google mention increased DMARC compliance is coming (alignment with both SPF and DKIM).

Refer to above (in my view!) reasonably prescient and informed speculation.

Email deliverability is a constant and ubiquitious issue for all of us. Not just for legitimate bulk email senders.

The smart move is — don’t put email authentication off. Do it now.

You might not be sending over 5000 messages in 24 hours. But you will enjoy better email deliverability, and easier access to support if you do experience deliverability issues.