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What Are the New Email Regulations?
Starting this month (February 2024), both Google and Yahoo require bulk email senders to set up email authentications and adhere to their sending guidelines. If a sender fails to comply, they risk negative impacts to the delivery of their emails to both Google and Yahoo users.
The email authentication requirements for both Google and Yahoo is to set up SPF, DKIM, & DMARC for your sender domains.
The sending guidelines for both Google and Yahoo is as follows:
- Make it easy to unsubscribe, by providing one-click unsubscribe and providing a link in the email.
- Make it easy to subscribe.
- Have a valid forward and reverse DNS record for your sending IPs
Read more about recommended best practices for Google and Yahoo.
Amazon also has a useful overview of bulk sender changes as well.
What Do I Need To Do?
Email Authentication:
Great news! You only have to set SPF and DKIM once for each sender domain since Vega Promote and LX Starter uses the same email service (Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)) for sending the two types of emails.
If your library has already set up the SPF and DKIM, then you're good to go!
If your library has not set up the SPF and DKIM for your domain please follow the steps below.
- Submit a Support ticket requesting SPF and DKIM records for your sender domain (ie: @clarivate.com). These files are specific to the LX Admin email server and your sender domain. If you have multiple sender domains, please include each one you intend to use to send emails from in LX Admin.
- You will get an email back from innovativeticketnotification@clarivate.com containing your SPF and DKIM records.
- For this step you will need to login to your domain provider. Add both the SPF record and your DKIM key to your DNS.
- Once the SPF and DKIM have been added to your DNS, the detection process will start to happen automatically, but it may take up to 72 hours.
- If it takes longer than 72 hours for your IT staff to make their DNS changes, please request that Support verify the domain verification status. It may be necessary for III staff to retry the verification detection process to verify your sender domain.
Unsubscribe Handling:
You don't need to do anything!
Vega Promote handles all unsubscribe issues automatically. An unsubscribe link is automatically added to the bottom of all email campaigns, in addition it automatically adds one-click unsubscribe to the header of all emails. Whenever someone's email hard bounces Promote automatically unsubscribes them from all communications sent from our email server and automatically changes their contact method for LX Starter notice emails.
You can configure the unsubscribe landing page that users see when they hit the unsubscribe link.
Unsubcribe does not apply to LX Starter notices as these messages are considered transactional messages opposed to promotional messages.
Subscribe:
Create a Sign Up Form in Promote that automatically adds people to the segments you send communications to. This will ensure only people who care to get your communications are signed up for them, keeping your unsubscribe and spam rates low.
Go a step further and turn on the Double Opt-In feature in Promote. When Double Opt-In is on it automatically sends a confirmation email to each person who has yet given consent for your organization to email them. In addition, Promote will only allow contacts who gave consent to enter your segments.
Double Opt-In does not apply to LX Starter notices as these messages are considered transactional messages opposed to promotional messages.
How Will The New Email Regulations Impact Our Email Sending?
As long as your organization adds the SPF and DKIM records to your DNS, you will not feel an impact on your email sending.
Promote and LX Starter were built to ensure your sender reputation and deliverability remain high and in check. Even if you don't configure an unsubscribe landing page or take the time to design your double opt-in email, we provide prebuilt versions that work great and give you the protection you need. As mentioned above, our bounce, spam, and unsubscribe handling is automatically taking the necessary steps to make sure bad emails stop receiving email communications in order to protect your domain and sender reputation.
What is DKIM?
According to Amazon SES, "DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email security standard designed to make sure that an email that claims to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain. It uses public-key cryptography to sign an email with a private key. Recipient servers can then use a public key published to a domain's DNS to verify that parts of the email have not been modified during the transit."¹
DKIM works in conjunction with SPF and DMARC to ensure that Amazon SES is authorized to send emails for your domain and prevents those emails from being treated as SPAM or not being delivered at all.
What is SPF?
Amazon SES documentation defines SPF as "Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email validation standard that's designed to prevent email spoofing. Domain owners use SPF to tell email providers which servers are allowed to send email from their domains. SPF is defined in RFC 7208."²
LX Starter and Promote both use Amazon SES for email sending so the requested SPF entry to be added to your library DNS is:
"v=spf1 include:amazonses.com ~all"
include:amazonses
What is DMARC?
Amazon states: "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an email authentication protocol that uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to detect email spoofing. In order to comply with DMARC, messages must be authenticated through either SPF or DKIM, or both."³
Innovative highly recommends that libraries use both SPF and DKIM along with email domain verification to enable compliance with DMARC.