Yahoogle 2024 - Key Takeaways from Mailgun's webinar

Huge shoutout to Thomas Knierien for organizing a way for all of the Email Geeks to get some answers directly from Yahoo and Google. Marcel Becker and Anu Yamunan did a fantastic job of responding to the sea of questions we all submitted.

Key Points Direct from the folks designing these changes:

1. Don't call it a "disruption" these have been best practices for bulk senders for years. According to Marcel at Yahoo, authentication is key to identifying yourself as a sender, making it easy to unsubscribe is about respecting your recipients, and making sure you are sending wanted mail will ensure a low complaint rate.
2. Anu from Google says mail will not be permablocked immediately, but starting in February a percentage of non-compliant traffic will receive temporary blocks. (We are already hearing reports from ESPs that Google has been sending back the following bounce message: "421 4.7.32 This mail has been rate limited because there is no DMARC alignment" so it would seem the fun has started a little early).
3. The one click unsubscribe, specifically in the header needs to be HTTPS, as HTTP just won't do according to Yahoo. Follow the guidance in RFC 8058 and you will be just fine. For most folks your ESP is already doing this for you.
4. The one click unsubscribe requirement does NOT apply to Transactional mail, and ultimately Google and Yahoo will let the users decide what they believe is transactional vs promotional with their behavior.
5. This is really about ensuring that the recipients, Gmail and Yahoo users, and really the ecosystem as a whole has a great experience with email. The point of these changes is to protect users from malicious emails, and ensure they receive wanted messages.
6. Marcel and Anu both confirmed that the majority of reputable senders have spam complaint rates that are far below 0.1% or 1:1000 recipients.
7. Regarding spam rate they both confirmed that senders who sporadically reach a 0.1% or 0.3% complaint rate will not find themselves instantly blocked, but those that maintain a complaint rate in this range or above will begin to see their traffic temporarily blocked with non-delivery reports indicating the root cause. This also does not really indicate a change in the filter, it is more just Google and Yahoo being more transparent about what they look at internally.
8. Also the 5,000 a day guidance from Google is not a hard and fast rule to determine whether or not someone is a bulk sender, they are going to look at a variety of things such as whether or not you are sending the same content to multiple recipients versus just sending correspondence.
9. According to Anu if you aren't compliant with the one click unsubscribe requirement yet you have until June before they start rejecting the traffic. (If you are an ESP struggling with this, give us a shout at emailindustries.com and we can help sort you out).
10. Marcel also highlighted that if your DMARC policy is "p=none" they take that as an indication you are focusing on the "R" in DMARC which stands for reporting, so it looks really weird if you don't have the "rua=mailto:" address configured. (We are also helping senders and platforms of all types with this problem over at Email Industries ).
11. Additionally Marcel said that "p=none" really isn't the goal for DMARC, for the greatest protection you'll really want to get your DMARC policy to "reject" and this security geek couldnt' agree more!

According to the folks behind these changes it's really about protecting the experience of their users, and honestly the ecosystem as a whole. Making sure that your mail is properly authenticated and identified, that it is easy for users to unsuscribe, and monitoring your bulk spam rates as a sender have always been important. Both mailbox providers confirmed that the largest bulk senders and reputable brands out there are already been doing this and have been for years, none of what is being requested is new or novel technology. While I may have coined the term DMARCpocalypse that was entirely hyperbole, doing all of the above has been the recommendation for senders that care about their email channel health for quite some time.

So take a deep breath, check your bounce messages, keep calm, and email on!