As more domains send email through shared IP space on transactional and marketing services, having the ability to attach reputation reliably to the sender domain is incredibly helpful in reducing abuse.
Google states that the new requirements are mandatory only when you send at least 5000 messages per day.
This is a lie. I send at most a few messages per day and usually less than one per day was towards a gmail account and I had implemented a part of the requirements, but not all of them.
Nevertheless, Google has started to reject my messages, so I was forced to waste time with the implementation of all requirements, even if they are somewhat redundant.
While the individual messages were not yet signed, Gmail should have already rejected any message claiming to be from my domain that was not sent by my own server.
At the beginning of March, I started getting temporary rejections from gmail. Not all of my outgoing messages, maybe 1 in 10. Most of these messages were to one individual, to whom I've been sending for years. My domain has existed continously since 2002, and has never sent spam. The rejection message was startling: words to the effect of "Your message has been rejected because of the awful reputation of the sending domain". The reputation of my domain is spotless, according to various testing tools.
There have been no new rejections in the last two weeks.
According to TFA, Google started rejecting a proportion of mail from bulk senders in February. I wonder if I got caught up in some half-baked roll-out of this new (old) policy.
My "domain reputation" should mean something like "the consensus of multiple reputation services", where those reputation services are reasonably open about how they score. It shouldn't mean "the completely opaque opinion of a single, hyper-dominant, secretive provider with all kinds of conflicts of interest".
Starting February 1, 2024, all email senders who send email to Gmail accounts must meet the requirements in this section.
- Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your sending domains.
- Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records. Learn more
- Use a TLS connection for transmitting email. For steps to set up TLS in Google Workspace, visit Require a secure connection for email.
- Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Learn more about spam rates
- Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard, RFC 5322.
- Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.
- If you manage a forwarding service, including mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email. ARC headers indicate the message was forwarded and identify you as the forwarder. Mailing list senders should also add a List-id: header, which specifies the mailing list, to outgoing messages.
https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?hl=en&arti...
Agreed it’s a net positive, but it kills me when the reason emails land in spam is misconfiguration at the recipient’s end. (Like forwarding emails which breaks SPF)