Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements: what small businesses need to do
Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo have required senders to authenticate their email. Bulk senders face stricter rules. If you send invoices, newsletters or booking confirmations, this affects you.
All senders to Gmail
- Set up SPF or DKIM for your domain
- Have valid forward and reverse DNS for your sending servers (your provider usually handles this)
- Use TLS and keep spam complaint rates low
Bulk senders (Google defines this as close to 5,000 or more messages a day to personal Gmail accounts)
- Have both SPF and DKIM
- Publish a DMARC record, where p=none is acceptable
- Make sure the From domain aligns with SPF or DKIM
- Offer one-click unsubscribe for marketing email and honour it within 2 days
- Keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%
Why small senders should care anyway
Even if you're nowhere near 5,000 emails a day, authenticated mail is more likely to reach the inbox, and DMARC at quarantine or reject stops fraudsters spoofing your domain.
A 15-minute checklist
- Run our free check
- Fix SPF so there's one record ending in ~all or -all
- Turn on DKIM in each sending tool
- Publish a DMARC record at p=none and collect reports
- Follow the DMARC guide to tighten it
Sources
Providers update these rules from time to time. Check the sources above for the current version.
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