Gmail and Yahoo Mail have announced a new set of mandatory requirements for email senders that will be effective from April 2024. This is to protect email domains, maintain healthy delivery rates and reduce spam rates for all email senders.
Here’s more information about these mandates:
What are these new sender requirements?
For all senders:
All senders must authenticate all mail with SPF and DKIM.
All senders must include a one-click unsubscribe method like the list-unsubscribe header.
Bulk senders must publish a DMARC record for their ‘from ‘address domain. Also, bulk senders must be sure that the ‘from’ domain matches the domain in their message's SPF and/or DKIM headers.
What happens if Freshservice customers do not adhere to these mandates?
These mandates will affect all Freshservice customers who have custom domains and have not enabled SPF and DKIM.
1) Emails sent to recipients having personal ID/accounts (like gmail.com, googlemail.com, yahoo.com, yahoo.co.in (all variants of Yahoo), etc) will not be delivered.
2) Users who have mailboxes with gmail.com (gmail.com, googlemail.com) or yahoo.com (yahoo.com, yahoo.co.in, all variants of Yahoo) as the sending address will be marked 'Unverified' and all emails herein will not be delivered.
What should you do?
Customers using custom domains for mailboxes must configure DKIM and SPF authentication and publish a DMARC record to avoid outgoing email disruptions before March 31, 2024.
Customers with mailbox domains like Gmail, Yahoo, Rocketmail et. al. must choose the ‘Use your own mail server’ option to send emails after this enforcement. The Default(Freshservice) option, will not be permitted after this enforcement as individual domains (like Gmail) consider it as a spoofing attempt when such emails are executed via Freshservice servers.
How can I ensure that my mailboxes have the necessary authentications?
Follow the below steps to set up SPF and DKIM email authentication in Freshservice:
1) Navigate to Admin > Email Settings and Mailboxes > Set up SPF and DKIM email authentication.
2) Follow two simple steps and verify on the same page to check if your records are updated.
To publish a DMARC record, here are a few useful links:
1) More information about DMARC is available at https://dmarc.org/.
2) Additional help in DMARC deployment for your organization is available at https://dmarc.org/resources/deployment-tools/.
More details here.
Note:
1) If you use a custom mail server, please set up SPF AND DKIM authentication at your service provider’s end, as Freshservice cannot support it here.
2) Though this is only for Gmail and Yahoo users, we recommend that other mailbox users (like Outlook) also enforce this to avoid any future disruptions.
If you have questions, please reach your Customer Success Manager, or write to us at [email protected].
