Monthly Archives: October 2023

Google and Yahoo are upping their game in 2024!

In the on-going battle against spam, Google and Yahoo have announced new standards for 2024 that will help protect their inboxes and curtail spam intrusions. This is great news for legitimate email senders who abide by email best practices as we expect other Inbox Providers and email services to follow their lead. However, your business may need to adapt to these new standards or risk missing the Inbox.

Google and Yahoo to Require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

For Google, if your business sends more than 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses, you must adopt SPF, DKIM, and DMARC by February 2024. Yahoo will apply the same trio of requirements to “bulk senders” in the first quarter of 2024, though they have not defined what constitutes a bulk sender.

The new email requirements include both SPF and DKIM records for authenticating email-sending domains, a DMARC record for the domain, and a “From” header that matches either the SPF or DMARC record, known as “alignment.” In addition, marketers must keep spam rates below 0.3% and provide the ability to unsubscribe with a single click if the recipient chooses.

What does this mean for your business?

Google’s and Yahoo’s requirements are a critical move to reinforce your company’s email best practices. With the two largest email providers taking major steps to secure inboxes, more Inbox Providers will adopt similar DMARC policies in the future. Getting prepared will be key.

If your company has already enabled SPF, DKIM and DMARC, you get a boost. Your messages will have to compete with fewer poorly configured emails or spam messages. Your email has protection against impersonation through better authentication and, with DMARC, you are able to see SPF and DKIM configuration issues that would put your email delivery at risk and detect spammers attempting to use your domain for fraud of phishing. If you have not configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC, you have a short window to get prepared. Regardless of your SPF, DKIM and DMARC configuration, however, the requirement to maintain a low rate of being marked as “spam” could really hurt you if you are purchasing email lists.

How Can MxToolbox Help?

With these upcoming changes to Google and Yahoo, now is the perfect time to use our various tools and products to improve your email deliverability!

Since DMARC will soon be a requirement for those providers, MxToolbox Delivery Center will help your sending domain achieve the best possible email delivery rates, including managing your DMARC setup. In addition, our Inbox Placement feature will tell you if your campaigns are being sent to the Spam/Junk folders or actually making it to inboxes, as well as which Inbox Provider(s) you are having trouble sending to.

MxToolbox is the Expert on email delivery. We offer a wide range of free and subscribed options, so be proactive now and take advantage of them before these new 2024 guidelines are applied to your outgoing newsletters and marketing campaigns.

Seriously, Stop Buying Email Lists

In the early days of the Internet, purchasing a list of email addresses was a legitimate business tactic. Lists were a new thing, sending an email was basically free, email servers accepted almost all email and spam was not much of a problem.

Spam – Unsolicited email that is sent in bulk.

Let me say this unequivocally, if you purchase and use email lists, You Are A Spammer. Any email sent in bulk that was not opted into by the recipient is considered spam. If you have zero prior contact with this email address, you are spamming it. It does not matter if you have a legitimate business and that you are not trying to scam the recipient, your email is still unwanted. Think of email spam as equivalent to the pile of unwanted ads in your regular mailbox. You didn’t ask for it and it wastes your time and resources to get rid of it.

Inbox Providers Have Ramped Up Spam Defenses

The main goal for Inbox Providers is to protect their users by eliminating irrelevant, unwanted and dangerous emails. Over the last 20 years, Inbox Providers have applied multiple layers of defenses around their inboxes:

  • Checking senders against Blacklists/Blocklists
  • Refusing non-TLS encrypted email
  • Checking SPF, DKIM and DMARC configurations and then bouncing non-compliant email
  • Scanning email attachments for malware
  • Scanning email links for potential malware websites
  • Checking content for known spammy verbiage
  • Deprioritizing email campaigns sent to closed, unused, or non-existent accounts
  • Aggregating sentiment across recipients

Now, using Aggregate Sentiment algorithms and AI, Inbox Providers can detect campaigns that have low relevance, start from purchased lists, or are likely to be marked as spam and drop the entire campaign in the spam folder. Further, some senders dependent on purchased email lists have reported all email from their domain being binned – essentially burning out their sending domain.

What can you do?

The first thing you need to do it stop depending on purchased email lists for prospecting, continuing to do so could burn out your domain reputation. To do this, you need to look at other methods for lead generation:

  • Online advertising
  • Word of mouth
  • Social media advertising
  • Opt-in email newsletters

How can MxToolbox help?

If you have burned out your sending domain, MxToolbox can help you setup a new email sending domain, configure email best practices, etc. however, you must change your email practices or this will happen again. DMARC, and a DMARC management tool like MxToolbox Delivery Center will help your sending domain achieve the best possible email delivery. In addition, our Inbox Placement feature will tell you if your campaigns are being dumped into the spam folder or making it to the Inbox and analyze your email for potential inbox placement issues.

Uncover your Email Problems with our Email Delivery Tools

Email delivery is probably the most important connection between Marketing Art and Information Technology. Whether your email is driving sales, connecting to vendors or simply for internal communications, an email that fails to make the Inbox is a failure of communications that can cost your business.

Email Health

A tool that is often overlooked yet is highly beneficial for your email deliverability is our Email Health Report. This tool executes hundreds of domain/email/network setup tests to ensure all of your systems are online and performing optimally. The report returns results for your domain and highlights critical problem areas that need to be resolved.

  • Get full visibility of your email’s health status in one concise report.
  • Identify every problem facing your email, including blacklist, mail server, web server, and DNS issues.
  • Be proactive about email health and detect any current email issues before they cause email failures.

Major MxToolbox Email Delivery Tools

Email delivery is a constantly changing technology landscape. Inbox providers change policies and technologies to protect their users and spammers change methods to get their unwanted messages read. MxToolbox is the Expert in Email Delivery and provides tools to better help you understand your legitimate email delivery issues.

  • Blocklist (IP or Host): The blocklist check tests a mail server’s IP address against over 100 DNS-based email blocklists.
  • DMARC Delivery Report: This tool creates comprehensive DMARC reports, providing insight into potential issues and any needed changes to your DMARC policy.
  • DMARC Report Analyzer: This option makes DMARC Aggregate XML reports human readable by parsing and aggregating them by IP address into helpful reports.
  • Email Bounceback Analyzer: This analyzer returns details regarding the bounce error, such as the inbox provider, why the message bounced, and additional information to help remedy the issue.
  • MTA-STS Lookup: This test checks a domain or hostname for an MTA-Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) DNS TXT record and also for a valid MTA-STS policy.
  • Spam Analyzer: This tool uses the SpamAssassin software to analyze your message and return a spam score from over 711 various criteria.

Inbox Placement Analysis

Our Inbox Placement tool analyzes your campaign emails before you send them. We determine if the email will make the inbox at major Inbox Providers like Google, Yahoo! and Outlook.com/Office365. We also analyze important technology and soft factors like:

  • DMARC Compliance
  • Broken or copious links
  • Wordiness
  • Broken or too many images
  • Spammy verbiage
  • Other indicators of spam

Inbox Placement is a feature of all paid Delivery Center plans, so you can test your marketing emails and improve your DMARC compliance all in one place.

Does DMARC and email deliverability seem too complicated?

MxToolbox Experts are here with a Managed Services approach to your email configuration issues.