Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

mailgun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 279 posts

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#221

Post by hedora »

cnees wrote: post #219
hedora wrote: post #205

> Gmail and Yahoo are getting serious about spam monitoring and senders will need to ensure they’re keeping below a set spam rate threshold. Does anyone know what this sentence means? Is this “the user said this is spam”, or “the gmail spam filter false positives 10% of the time; don’t be part of the 10%, or it’ll permaban you”?

Gmail postmaster tools says, "This dashboard shows the percentage of user-reported spam vs emails that were sent to the inbox for active users. Emails delivered directly to the spam folder are not included in the spam rate calculation. Only emails authenticated by DKIM are eligible for spam-rate calculation." The threshold for the number defined above is 0.3%; that's the point where Gmail starts penalizing the sender…

Oh, so if 0.3% of people subscribe to a mailing list, then mark it as spam (instead of unsubscribing), then it goes to my spam folder?

That explains why I had to immediately disable gmail's spam filter.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#222

Post by mjw1007 »

simscitizen wrote: post #211

Mandatory DMARC basically breaks all e-mail forwarding services (SPF doesn't survive forwarding due to modification of Return-Path). I think ARC/RFC8617 is supposed to be the fix for that, but it's not even standardized yet. This seems like a rather big issue?

Have Google actually documented what they mean when they say DMARC is mandatory?

Does a DMARC record with p=none count?

Does DMARC with an SPF record that that places no restrictions count?

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#223

Post by ehutch79 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #177
jwr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Yes, I definitely think that. The engineers can build anything, but where the company focuses matters. I've seen transactional E-mails get sorted into people's spam/junk/newsletter folders too many times.

I also get tons of spam to my inbox despite regularly marking it as such, so if they are classifying marketing emails, they're not doing anything with that information. How hard is it to classify a message that literally contains the string "this is an advertisement"?

Turn off your spam filtering for a week.

You'll find out what the quality of the job they are doing is.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#224

Post by chuckadams »

xur17 wrote: post #176
alright2565 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went through this with Nextdoor in October. Well, I personally didn't do all 50 clicks, but I asked their customer service to do it and they confirmed I was unsubscribed. Of course, I got a new message from them yesterday because they've added a dozen different lists since then and automatically opted everyone into them.

Is this technically permitted behavior under CANSPAM? Seems like a company could just create a new "newsletter / list" for every new marketing email they send.

It'd be up to a judge and/or jury to decide. If one can establish that the intent was to ignore one's attempts to unsubscribe, it'd be a pretty clear-cut violation. Most reputable senders have an "opt out of all further communications" checkbox (with some fine print about legally required and transactional emails). Pretty much the only way to bring a private action under CAN-SPAM though is to be an ISP and show "actual damages".

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#225

Post by aendruk »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #185
kragen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you think these are unrealistic, i've got news for you; the world is a lot bigger than you think it is

What kind of newsletters are you subscribed to

Mailing lists

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#226

Post by hedora »

EGreg wrote: post #192

Unsubscribe HAS to require an authenticated session. What do they mean by “single click”? Otherwise anyone who receives a forwarded email can unsubscribe you! Right? At least we can email the peson to say they’ve been unsubscribed, as a transactional email? And give them a chance to resubscribe and prevent such unsubscriptions — or what? Enable easy unsubscription: Senders will need to implement a single-click unsubs…

It certainly does not require authentication. Have you used unsubscribe flows? Normally, you click once, it goes to a web page that displays your email address, and has an "I'm sure" button, and maybe some checkboxes to only partially unsubscribe.

If you really care about people being maliciously unsubscribed from marketing materials they forwarded around, then you can be one of the sites that sends a final "you have been unsubscribed" confirmation email.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#227

Post by dharmab »

andersa wrote: post #123
wl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe transactional emails don't need an unsubscribe link like marketing emails, but they do need a "not my account; please stop" link to avoid the spam button.

Why would you be receiving transactional emails for an account that isn't yours?

This is a frequent occurrence for anyone with a common name.

https://xkcd.com/1279

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#228

Post by callalex »

boplicity wrote: post #169
dexwiz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engin…

> you probably should have unsubscribe links They're not requiring just unsubscribe links. They're specifically requiring "one-click" unsubscribe links that can accept a POST request for unsubscribing. This allows their software to have an unsubscribe button that doesn't require the user to leave their software. This is the RFC that has to be complied with: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 Note, that thi…

>this is not easy for many people using legacy software. It's a major change.

That’s fine, I never wanted to receive messages from those people in the first place.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#229

Post by chuckadams »

jasonjayr wrote: post #27
TheCycoONE wrote: post #25

DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are old hat and implemented by anyone serious for years. What's buried in this article is the required https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 support for one-click unsubscribe posts. I don't see many messages in my inbox yet with that.

I understand that the request happens in the background by the MUA at the user's express consent, and the unsubscribe is not allowed to send back any ui/html/whatever to present to the user, but the RFC is missing any information about how a response ought to be handled, HTTP Status code wise? Retry if 400/500? Give user any affirmative or negative response that it succeeded or failed?

That's up to the MUA, but I imagine that they would at least show an error dialog. If the backend of that POST is broken, then the spam complaints are going to rack up, which will get the list blocked, List-Unsubscribe header or no (some of the most notorious spammers around were actually quite scrupulous about having said header, which they would actually obey ... temporarily)

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#230

Post by callalex »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #135
dexwiz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engin…

"transactional versus marketing" In my last big job we had big discussions about what is marketing. What can marketing pack into a transactional without it becoming a marketing email? Banner? A tagline in the signature? Testimonials? Also - b/c Germany - big discussions with legal on that topic.

This is like making technical arguments to someone else that actually, legally, you are not sexually harassing them. If there’s even an inkling of a question, your behavior sucks.
Post reply on HN