Imminent Changes Impacting Email Deliverability

Email Deliverability Changes in 2024

It’s here! Today is the day Google and Yahoo have made email deliverability changes all nonprofits need to pay attention to. Sending email through your CRM or an Email provider such as MailChimp or Constant Contact, now requires some extra settings. Whether your organization sends 5000 messages a day to Gmail accounts or less, you’ll want to go ahead and make sure you’re in compliance. This gives your fundraising, marketing, and volunteer emails the best chance of staying out of the spam box.

Email Deliverability Best Practices for Nonprofits

Google and Yahoo’s new email requirements align with long-standing best practices that we have been recommending to our nonprofit clients for years. Here’s one of our past articles on how to test a specific email you want to send to your constituents to score its spammyness: Nonprofit TIP: Check your Email Deliverability by using Mail-tester.com. Included in the article is a link to an email deliverability tester.

You can see the full new Google Email Sender Guidelines and here’s what Yahoo published.

Below you will read about the two different parts to compliance.

Email Authentication with SPF, DKIM, & DMARC records

Your email domain server needs to be set up properly with appropriate SPF, DKIM, & DMARC records. This will reduce the possibility of your email being spoofed to send spam among other security protections. Spoofing is a good way to get your email domain blacklisted by Google, Yahoo and others. Here are some things to look for at your organization:

• It’s a good idea to connect with your hosting administrator to double check your settings are updated. Most website designers automatically set up DMARC and DKIM records appropriately to prevent security issues, but it’s always good to check.
• Your SPF record should include the appropriate information for sending email through your CRM or Email provider. Your system administrator should be able to get this information to give to your hosting administrator.

Implement One-click Unsubscribe Option in Your Emails

You may need to change some settings in your email provider and/or CRM. We’ve been seeing information coming through from most of the CRMs and email providers (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc…) about settings changes needed in order to be in compliance. This may mean you’ll see a new “unsubscribe” in your email headers and a one-click unsubscribe at the bottom. You’ll want to check in and see what you need to do:

• Sometimes the providers are making all the changes and sometimes you need to toggle on one or two settings.
• To know what you need to do, check your system provider’s blog (or past emails) or ask your account executive to see if there’s anything you need to do.

Protecting your Domain Reputation & Avoiding Spam Filters

Compliance protects the good name of your domain and lessens your chances of being marked spam. Keep in mind, these settings not only help you stay in good standing with Google and Yahoo, they also prevent email security issues. So, it’s good practice anyway. Of course the advantage of working with us is that we have the expertise to take care of it for your organization through our ongoing support services. Contact us for more information.

FAQs

What is a Domain Name?

A Domain Name is the unique, human-readable address used to access websites. Ours is backofficethinking.com.

What is SPF?

SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and verifies that the email comes from an authorized server for a specific domain.

What is DKIM?

DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail and adds a digital signature to the email content, ensuring it hasn’t been tampered with in transit.

What is DMARC?

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance and builds on SPF and DKIM, telling receiving servers what to do if an email fails authentication.