Back in October 2023, Google & Yahoo announced they will require email senders to authenticate their emails, allow for easy unsubscription and stay under a reported spam threshold in order to help protect recipients from unwanted emails.

Ensuring your emails are properly authenticated has always been best practice, but not all senders are using the tools available to protect their emails. If senders don’t authenticate their emails, it will leave them vulnerable to bad actors that will impersonate domains & send phishing emails which will cause damage to your sending reputation.

Gmail and Yahoo aim to protect their users, and for a less spammy inbox. This is why they have decided that email authentication and following deliverability best practices are no longer optional. If you want to ensure your emails continue to make it to the inbox, you will have to comply with key best practices for email authentication and spam prevention, this means:

While Gmail & Yahoo are primarily targeting large bulk senders in their recent announcement (a bulk sender is defined as anyone who sends more than 5,000 emails per day). If you’re a smaller sender or only send transactional email, you’re less likely to be initially impacted-but this doesn’t mean you should ignore the changes

What is being required today for larger senders is likely to become a requirement for all email senders in the future. So whether you send one email or more than a million, taking action now to protect your domains, avoid spam and follow deliverability best practices is key to keeping your emails arriving into inboxes and keeping your email program healthy.