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Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo have required authentication from bulk senders, roughly 5,000 messages a day or more. To keep inbox placement, a domain must publish a valid DMARC policy (at least p=none), keep its spam rate below 0.3%, and offer one-click unsubscription.
What bulk senders must do
- Publish a DMARC policy. A published record in DNS is now required for all bulk senders (5,000+ emails a day).
- Pass SPF and DKIM, with alignment. Bulk senders must pass both SPF and DKIM, and the visible “Header From” domain must align with at least one of them.
- Keep the spam rate below 0.3%.
- Offer one-click unsubscription.
Why 0.1% is the real goal
0.3% is the “hard limit”. Google recommends staying below 0.1% to avoid temporary delivery throttling.
What happens if you fall short
Falling short of these thresholds costs inbox placement. Mail is filtered to spam, and sustained failures are refused at the gateway.
Why alignment is where setups fail
Most businesses struggle with DMARC alignment failures. Alignment fails when the domain in the SPF or DKIM check doesn’t match the domain the recipient sees.
SentraDMARC reads every aggregate report receivers send, usually one a day per receiver. It names each failing sender with the fix for how it failed.
So you catch these errors in the reports rather than in a bounce. Understanding Alignment explains the two “From” addresses involved.
Beyond the requirements: MTA-STS and TLS-RPT
Our platform hosts MTA-STS and TLS-RPT as well. Neither is required by anyone today.
Both harden the inbound half of the problem that SPF, DKIM and DMARC do not touch: whether mail sent to you is encrypted in transit, and whether you find out when it is not.
Check whether your domain publishes DMARC, SPF and DKIM today. The free scan needs no account.
