Google announces plan to make Gmail “less spammy”: A checklist to help

If you select multiple messages in the list view and mark them as spam, Gmail will ask if you want to also unsubscribe. Probably using this mechanism?

    Report Spam and Unsubscribe
    These messages will be marked as spam. Would you also like to stop receiving 
    similar messages from following senders? Learn more.

    

    [Report Spam & Unsubscribe] [Report Spam]

So the short version is that Google is requiring senders of more than 5,000 messages per day to have DKIM and SPF configured, as well as one-click unsubscribe.

This is excellent to see. Many email providers have made this easy to set up, but many admins don’t go through the extra steps because “it adds complexity” or some other lazy excuse.

I think the final criteria, “don’t send spammy messages” will be harder to comply with. Because marketing staff genuinely don’t see their messages as spam. They see it as an “engagement opportunity” or whatever marketing hoops they jump through to justify another particular email.

NextDoor is horrible with this. 7 different "groups" of notifications each with 5+ notification types each with an option to disable it.

The unsubscribe link in each email only lets you unsubscribe from that one specific notification type.

You have to login to go through and disable them all (a 5 minute task by itself) but then when they add new groups or types its auto-enabled.

Super frustrating and led to me deleting my account.

> I'm pretty sure that Gmail has support for the `List-Unsubscribe` mechanism

They do not, see my comment in reply to a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37773525

> To add yet another protection, moving forward, we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under to ensure Gmail recipients aren’t bombarded with unwanted messages. This is an industry first, and as a result, you should see even less spam in your inbox.

How is this an industry first? Every large receiving domain has had thresholds that they expect senders to stay under regarding the number of messages that bounce and receive spam complaints. As last I recall, the typical threshold for complaints was around 0.1% of messages (but it's been years since I worked in email). Gmail has certainly had a limit like this of some kind, whether or not they've talked about it.

Update: looks like Gmail landed on that same number of 0.1% as documented in https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#spam-rate - with an upper limit being 0.3%.

I do really like what Google has been doing to drive adoption of technologies in email like DKIM, DMARC, TLS, etc. I'm not trying to be critical generally. I'm just surprised by this claim.

Perhaps what's an industry first is telling senders their complaint rate [1], and establishing a clear and transparent threshold on it? (Most of the time, complaint rate thresholds are not documented publicly and transparently). So providing this level of transparency may in fact be an industry first.

What would also be a huge step forward, if Gmail is doing this, is migrating to a concept of email reputation that is entirely based on the sender's domain name (and not their IP address). Reading between the lines in their documentation, this seems to be the case (e.g., the requirement to set up SPF and DKIM) -- and calculating statistics like the complaint rate at that level -- though I can't tell for sure. With DKIM being required for all traffic, hopefully IP-based reputation will be a thing of the past.

[1] Senders should be able to calculate their own complaint rate as long as receivers provide a feedback loop, which most large senders do AFAIK, though unsophisticated senders might not have their own tooling to do this.