A Gmail bounce just came back with a line about “sender requirements” and a link to a support page you’ve never seen before.

You’ve read the Google announcement and the Yahoo one, and pasted your DNS records into a text file to compare them against the examples.

The announcements tell you what will be enforced, not whether your domain passes today.

The next five minutes cover the two rules that matter — a DMARC policy for anyone sending over 5,000 emails a day, and a user-reported spam rate under 0.3% — and how InboxStack helps you stay on the right side of both.

If you’re reading this because a bounce mentioned Gmail’s sender requirements, you’re in the right place.

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The DMARC requirement for high-volume senders

Google and Yahoo announced the change together, and it targets high-volume senders. Anyone sending more than 5,000 emails a day to their users must have a DMARC policy in place by February 2024. The full list of what they ask for is in the Google and Yahoo sender requirements.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) stops other people sending mail that claims to be from your domain. It builds on SPF and DKIM and tells Gmail and Yahoo what to do with mail that fails both. Our DMARC, DKIM and SPF walkthrough covers how the three records fit together. The result for recipients is fewer phishing emails wearing a real company’s domain.

Gmail’s 0.3% user-reported spam threshold

For the first time, Gmail set a number. Bulk senders must keep user-reported spam under 0.3%. Cross it and Gmail starts filtering the domain.

That puts the burden on relevance: mail people asked for and open. Sending to a list that reports you is now a measurable problem, not a vague one.

What InboxStack does about both rules

InboxStack was built to make these two rules easier to meet:

  1. DMARC setup. It walks you through creating and managing the DMARC record so the policy is in place before the deadline.
  2. Spam-rate watching. It tracks your user-reported spam rate against Gmail’s 0.3% line and alerts you when it climbs.
  3. One dashboard. SPF, DKIM, DMARC and the spam-rate data sit in one place instead of across Postmaster, DNS and your ESP.
  4. Guides. Written walkthroughs for the records and the rules.

At the time of writing InboxStack is free, and that may change. The February 2024 DMARC deadline and the 0.3% threshold are already in force, so the sooner the records and the spam rate are checked, the less there is to fix under pressure.