Google, Yahoo, and other Big Email Service Provider Requirements

In January of 2024, major online providers of free email inboxes such as Google, Yahoo, Outlook, and Hotmail, changed their requirements for incoming email. They have tightened security requirements and now are much more likely to mark incoming email as spam, especially if a large distribution list is detected.

In order to ensure your emails continue to be sent with a high rate of deliverability, MailPoet is now also enforcing these policies within our plugin. This ensures that your newsletters, post notifications, confirmation emails and transactional emails will meet these providers' requirements and continue to be accepted as valid by them.

These requirements are being enforced as best practices for all MailPoet plan subscribers who send emails through our MailPoet Sending Service.

Meeting the new requirements

Most MailPoet users will have to take three steps to ensure their account and plugin meet the new requirements.

Stop sending marketing campaigns from free addresses, such as @gmail.com and @yahoo.com addresses.

If you’re using MailPoet to send emails from a 3rd-party email domain you do not own (e.g. @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or others), you’ll need to update and change your MailPoet campaigns to send from an email address on your site’s branded domain instead (e.g. name@businessname.com). Not only does this make your campaigns look more professional and more recognizable to your customers, but it will also help your campaigns reach your contacts’ inboxes. 

You will need to first create an inbox on your domain for use as the sending address. Please ensure this is not a role-based email address.

Then, change your MailPoet settings to use this new address in two places:

1. Add the new address as your "From" address under MailPoet > Settings on the "Basic" tab.
2. If you have a Post Notification email scheduled to send regularly, any emails defined as part of Automations, or any Newsletter templates saved, you will need to edit those emails / templates in order to change the "From" address on the sending parameters screen to the new address as well. Please note that editing emails or automations will deactivate them, so please remember to re-activate them after editing.

Authenticate your Sender Domain.

Large email services like Google now require your sending domain to be authenticated. This information is added by MailPoet to your outgoing email headers and is now a requirement to send emails via MailPoet.

The domain you will need to authenticate is the domain used for the "from" address on your outgoing emails. So, if you are sending emails using a from address like " info@mymaildomain.com" then it is the "mymaildomain.com" domain that needs to be verified. Note that this can differ from your actual website domain if you prefer.

To verify your sending domain, you will need to add four field / value pairs to your domain's DNS settings. You will need access to the website hosting account where your site is hosted in order to set these fields.

The general steps are:

1. Log into your MailPoet.com account
2. Go to the "My Sender Domains" tab and click to open the information for the domain you need to verify (or click to add a new domain if the domain you wish to use is not shown here)
3. Note the four fields shown here - each of these needs to be added to your domain DNS settings 
4. Log into your account at wherever your website is hosted
5. Add the four required fields to your domain in your website hosting account

As every web host handles the addition of new DNS fields to a domain differently, if you require help adding these fields to your domain, please reach out to your web host directly.

More information on how to set up these fields can be found here.

Once the fields and values are added to your domain, it can take up to 48 hours to propagate around the internet and reach our servers, so please allow a day or two for the domain to verify before reaching out for help from our support team.

Send to users who want your newsletters.

The more interactive and engaged your subscriber list, the more likely Google and other large email providers are to recognize that you are sending valuable content that your subscribers want to be delivered safely.

How can you improve your opening rates and minimize your spam complaints? MailPoet has two popular features you can utilize. 

Our “ Inactive Subscribers Feature” allows you to exclude subscribers who do not interact with your newsletters after some time, and are no longer interested in your content. You can use the setting under MailPoet > Settings on the "Advanced" tab to automatically move subscribers to inactive status if they do not open your emails; they will continue to count towards your subscriber count and can still be emailed directly for re-engagement purposes, but will no longer receive your regular emails.

You can also set up segments for your subscribers to only send to new subscribers and your engaged subscribers. This ensures that you send your newsletters only to users who are interested in your content and have shown that they will receive and open your. You can learn more about our Segmentation feature in our Knowledge Base.

Other requirements MailPoet handles automatically

Other new requirements from these email service providers are already automatically handled by MailPoet and should not require additional changes in your account or in your plugin settings. These include:

1. Align the “From” sender domain with the DKIM signature domain. MailPoet will do this automatically when you add your domain as a Sender Domain.
2. Make it easy to unsubscribe. MailPoet generates One-Click Unsubscribe links for each of your subscriber and adds this to any outgoing email that includes the Footer block. The Footer block appears by default in all email templates.
3. Set up forward and reverse DNS records for sending IP addresses.
4. Use TLS encryption to securely transmit email.
5. Format messages following the RFC 5322 format.