Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements

Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require authenticated mail from every sender, and more from bulk senders. Mail that does not comply is spam-foldered or rejected.

Free: shows what is wrong and what your fix contains. The ready-to-paste records are $1.

Everyone sending to Gmail or Yahoo

Authenticate with SPF or DKIM.
Have valid forward and reverse DNS (PTR) for your sending IP addresses.
Use TLS to deliver the mail.
Keep the spam rate reported in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.3%.
Format messages to RFC 5322, and do not imitate Gmail in your From header.

Bulk senders (around 5,000 messages a day to Gmail or more)

Authenticate with both SPF and DKIM.
Publish a DMARC record. A policy of p=none meets the rule; quarantine or reject protects you from spoofing.
Align your From domain with the SPF or DKIM domain, so DMARC can pass.
Offer one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058) in marketing mail, and honour it within two days.

Once you count as a bulk sender, Google treats you as one from then on, even if your volume drops.

Check where you stand

SPF, DKIM, DMARC and alignment are all public DNS, so they can be checked from outside. Enter your domain below. Unsubscribe headers and spam rate cannot be seen from DNS: check those in your sending tool and in Google Postmaster Tools.

Fix it for your domain

The Fix Kit reads your domain's live DNS and writes the corrected SPF, DMARC and DKIM records for your mail provider, ready to paste. See what it contains for free; the records are $1.

Free tools: full domain report SPF checker DMARC checker DKIM checker monitoring