As from February 2024, Google will roll out stricter requirements for marketers that want to have their email campaigns delivered to Gmail inboxes.

These new rules apply to all senders who send email to Gmail accounts:

• If you haven’t already, authenticate your email domains with SPF, DKIM & DMARC. Note that DMARC is only necessary if you send close to 5,000 or more messages within a 24-hour period.
• Don’t send unwanted emails: keep your spam rates below 0,10% and make sure to never reach 0,30%. Interesting to know is that spam rate is calculated daily.
• Make it easy to unsubscribe: your promotional email campaigns need to support one-click unsubscribe and have a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message itself.

As I understand it, these requirements apply to all senders when sending email campaigns to personal Gmail accounts, so apparently Google Workspace accounts are not affected.

If you fail to comply with these new requirements, Google will either reject your email or deliver it to the user’s spam folder.

Google is also urging us to meet their new sender requirements before the deadline because they say it will improve our email delivery.

The plan is to add a compliance status dashboard to Postmaster Tools early next year, so sign up to Google Postmaster Tools to keep track of how you are doing and to monitor the reputation of your sending domain.

Also, make sure to read through the following posts on the Google blog – as it contains a lot more detail and very useful information:

• Email sender guidelines
• Email sender guidelines FAQ
• Email sender requirements & Postmaster Tools FAQ

Another interesting article on this topic is this one: Your 2024 guide to Google & Yahoo’s new requirements for email senders.

Happy reading!