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Your guide to Google & Yahoo’s new requirements for email senders
Your guide to Google & Yahoo’s new requirements for email senders

A guide to Gmail & Yahoo new requirements for emails senders in 2024

Brian Mongey avatar
Written by Brian Mongey
Updated over a week ago

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.

Why are Google & Yahoo changing the rules?

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:

  • Authenticate your emails using DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.

  • Making it very easy to unsubscribe by clicking just one link, and process requests within two days.

  • Ensuring that you’re sending wanted email, by maintaining a spam complaint rate of <0.3%


What we think: These changes matter for every email sender

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.


What are Intercom doing?

  • We already include instructions on how to set up DNS records for your custom domains so that you can authenticate them and achieve DKIM and SPF alignment. We’ve now updated them with guidance on setting up DMARC records too.

  • Intercom now supports RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe List-Unsubscribe headers so that your marketing and subscription emails are compliant with Google and Yahoo requirements.


Get Ready for these changes by following these simple steps

  • Review what email addresses you are using for email sending

    • Visit the Sender Email Addresses page in Email Settings. Ensure you are using your domain email address, not a temporary Intercom address as the default email address. Check that the sender email addresses listed are correct.

  • Fully authenticate your custom domains

    • Visit the Domains page in Email Settings. This page contains the information you'll need to configure the DNS records for each of the domains.

    • For a step by step guide on how to do this see our support article

    • Make sure you are publishing a DMARC record. It is fine to start off with a p=none policy but we recommend engaging with a DMARC report analysis service and moving towards a quarantine or reject policy once you are confident in doing so.

  • Consider the different types of emails you send:- can your customers opt-in to just those that are relevant for them?

    • Check out Intercom’s guide to granular subscriptions here.

  • Make sure you are carefully monitoring your Spam Complaints

    • Register your domain for Google Postmaster tools & ensure your Spam Complaint rates are <0.3%

    • Employ deliverability best practices like list management to ensure you’re only sending messages to engaged users. More info can be found at preventing spam complaints.


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