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Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

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Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#191
post #185

The authentication stuff is all standard practice so no big change IMO. However the hard spam limit with Gmail in particular will get interesting. I predict this is going to create some insane headaches for indie Saas startups. Gmail is the only inbox provider that doesn’t offer a real feedback loop (you don’t actually know if a given email address marked you as spam when sending to gmail users). The FBL in Google po…

Honestly sounds like I'm on the side of Gmail here. Think about this from the perspective of an actual spammer. You get a notification that address XYZ is marked as spam by user ABC. Well, now you just email user ABC from a different address.

Not even spammers want to waste time & money emailing people who have already marked their emails as spam (that's as clear a signal as any to move onto the next victim).

The real problem is, for legitimate senders, the people who send less emails actually get higher levels of spam complaints! This is because humans are human and they forget who you are. I would argue this actually incentivizes sending more emails. This is why marketers all recommend sending garbage emails daily/weekly/monthly.

The truth is, the companies with full-time spam (marketing) departments will do just fine with these changes. It's the little guy who is going to have to navigate these complexities (likely unsuccessfully), and get shut out from yet another technology that used to be open.

On top of that, Google has started to offer perks for senders within Gmail for a $1,500 per year fee (VMC). They're basically one step away from collecting rents on all of email by way of their monopoly.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, this would make a great blog post (or Show HN) with details! "I run my own mail server and get better spam results than Gmail"

I think that's pretty standard for everybody who runs its own mail server (like "shared webhosting"-running even). Owning your mail should also be standard for everybody in tech, you don't want to rely on Google for something that important.

I mean, electricity is also very important, but that doesn't imply that everybody in tech should be configuring their own wiring. It's fine to do that if you want to, but it is completely reasonable to expect that most people should be able to rely on someone else to do the work of ensuring that the key infrastructure runs well, and not think about it so that they can focus on the specialization they want to handle.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#193
What exactly are the news here? I see three points but fail to comprehend them, because I thought all those things were a norm for a long while:

1. Is it the news that Google still accepted bulk volumes of unauthenticated mails in 2023? If that's true - finally, good riddance. Although I believe most spam those days comes from legit hacked domains.

2. Am I reading this right that List-Unsubscribe and/or unsubscription link is going to be required for high-volume senders, marketing and transactional? That's good to hear, although - again - it's hard to believe this is a requirement only now. I thought everyone with at least a sliver of honesty already had those for a long while.

3. Enforce low spam report ratio? It's news to me that the "report spam" buttons didn't behave that way already, I assumed that if users actively report then domain gets blocked (unless it's whitelisted, e.g. to defend from a false reporting DoS attack).

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"open models/blacklists don't come anywhere close to Gmail's capabilities" I disagree with you. I use Postfix with rspamd plugged into it for my personal email account. I get way more spam to my gmail than I do to my personal account, and I sign up to everything with my personal account. rspam also dkim signs my emails when I send them etc, verifies SPF/DKIM/DMARC on recipet etc. Now to counter that - I am a TINY mai…

FWIW, this would make a great blog post (or Show HN) with details! "I run my own mail server and get better spam results than Gmail"

I suspect it’s not that unusual. In six years of running my personal mail server, I’ve received exactly zero spam messages with grey-listing as my sole anti-spam measure. The only time I got spam was when I had to move my domain to a new server and forgot to enable the postgrey service.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#195

> we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type. (Edit: Also, everything requiring a notification - by e-mail if they…

If I'm certain I don't know the company, or I know the company but there is no unsubscribe button, it goes straight to Spam, no questions asked.

A decade ago I went to my country's embassy to renew my passport, and they now use my email to subscribe me to the newsletters of any new political party. All unsubscribe links just 404s. Shameful behaviour.

Anything I receive from any of their political candidates goes straight to spam now. The hope is that I am training the spam filter so it marks those as spam for all other users as well.

It's simple really: have clearly visible, working unsubscribe link in the body of the email that doesn't require jumping through hoops, and be from a company I know and use. Otherwise the spam filter learns about it.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#196
This will be interesting to see how this plays out internationally, since some countries don't have the same anti-spam laws we do. Will I stop getting notifications from some of the non-EU, non-US services that I am a member of just because they don't have in-email unsubscribe links (I can still unsub on their website)? These are not companies under sanction, so I have every right to communicate with them freely, even if they don't obey the same laws as where I live. Should I end up suffering damages because Google blocks legitimate communications, will they be taking liability for their interference?

For clarity, I am not against anti-spam measures, but I do worry about centralized services being overly strict and doing damage to their customers, especially if it is so draconian that it prevents delivery of important communications as retaliation.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#197
Bulk sending breaks the utility of email. I wish there was a way to say, “Don’t allow my email to receive bulk sent emails.”

I can’t imagine how much that would improve my life. I just don’t want to see it. It breaks my attention far too frequently for far too little utility, and I would love it if entire emails I own could be bulk spam free.

I don’t really want a better version of our shitty current system.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#198

Reading all the comments makes me think I'm an outlier. I very aggressively unsubscribe from everything so I get very little mailing list spam. Maybe a few messages a month. What I do get _constantly_ is spam email messages to my inbox from Gmail and Outlook domains. At least one a day for many years. Because it from Gmail, they have very little spam filtering done, yet if any other provider sent these messages then…

Yep, I'm the opposite of you. I get almost zero true "spam" to my Gmail account. Maybe 1-2 messages a month.

Whereas quite a few of these quasi-spam marketing emails from a company that I once had some interaction with. The worst is hotels - you stay at 10 hotels during the course of a trip, then you get added to 10 email lists for the rest of your life.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#199

> we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under I hope they make it really strict. I'm sick of companies that send you spam ("newsletters") just because you interacted with them once, then when you unsubscribe, you get unsubscribed from that one list, so they keep spamming you just with a slightly different newsletter type. (Edit: Also, everything requiring a notification - by e-mail if they…

This is exactly why GDPR exists. What you are describing is illegal in the EU. Sending marketing communication requires clear opt in consent.

Are you sure? I don't have more than anecdotal data, but I remember unsubscribing from EU newsletters to be much more cumbersome than from US ones.

Re: Gmail, Yahoo announce new 2024 authentication requirements for bulk senders

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't people like you just spend exactly 2 minutes to create a bogus gmail (or etc) account for yourself that you put down when you don't want to put your own email in? I just cannot fathom any reason for you doing this that isn't just malice. Surely nobody is just so _lazy_ that they intend to screw over their friends over a minute or two process making an account.

> Why don't people like you just spend exactly 2 minutes to create a bogus gmail (or etc) account for yourself Have you tried doing this recently? Creating an email address has become a fairly draconian process.

Yeah, I just made a new google account today. It takes about 2 minutes. You need a birth date (easily lied about), a phone number (it's google, they have your phone number already, no reason to lie) where they will send you an 8 digit code for you to confirm, then type in your desired email address and your password. Hardly draconian. Viola, you have a gmail account. You can do more to ensure you're the only one that ever logs into it if you like, but chances are if you're setting this account up for the purpose we're talking about, you're just writing down the email address you set up and then forgetting everything else.

I'm not sure, are you implying that it is not worth doing this, and you would rather instead just pollute the inboxes of people that happen to know you? If so, would you like to be friends? I'd be happy to receive your junk emails if in exchange I can come by your place and just leave my trash in your front yard/driveway.

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