Just a quick note today to address some bad advice I've seen out there in the wild.
The question that I've seen asked is this: The new Gmail sender requirements announced by Google -- do those apply only to mail sent to the individual mailboxes at the gmail.com and googlemail.com domains, or do they also apply to mail sent to any personal, company or corporate domains hosted by Google?
The bad advice is this: It applies to Gmail (only). Don't worry about it when sending to other email domains hosted by Google, like wombatmail.com.
Why is this bad advice? Because it's sort of technically true, but a "don't worry about it" answer is REALLY shortsighted.
Why? Because some of us can read between the lines here and know that, while the new sender requirements mostly do apply to gmail.com and googlemail.com mailboxes only (today), Google is very likely working toward one goal of requiring full compliance to cover every mailbox they host.
They undoubtedly have contractual requirements and technical complexities around hosted domain mail, so it is fair to theorize that Google Workspace mail is not a simple homogenous group of mailboxes all across their systems. It's big, it's complex, it's configurable, it can interface with various BEC (Business Enterprise Compromise)-preventing security systems and spam filters, and can do more with mail routing, processing and filtering than is done with the regular consumer Gmail user mailboxes.
But that doesn't mean that Google doesn't want all mail to comply with best practices. Nor does it imply that they're never going to attempt to apply best practice requirements the whole way across all of their systems. Just that they haven't done it yet.
While there could continue to be a compliance variance across the Google Workspace/Gmail consumer mailbox landscape, making sure all your mail complies with the current Google updated requirements means that your configuration will be future proof, is aligned with best practices, is compatible with multiple mailbox providers beyond Gmail, and makes it every slightly more likely that Google will look kindly upon you if you ever have a deliverability issue that requires that you beg them for assistance or consideration.
Historically, mailbox providers and blocklist providers have taken a dim view of senders that target infrastructure settings or compliance requirements to only specific mailbox providers. Because this is almost always related to some sort of bad practice or unwanted mail. In the past, some not-so-great senders would dedicate servers and IP addresses to send mail only to Yahoo or only to Microsoft or only to Google. Besides the strong implication that somebody doing this is a bad actor (because you could rarely, if ever, find good guys engaging in this sort of thing), it impedes the ability for receiving systems and spam filters to better understand your sending reputation. At a very simplistic level, consider that if your IPs only send mail to Yahoo, you won't have any Microsoft SNDS feedback data to rely on for those IP addresses.
That's a bit extreme; but I wanted to help make it clear why deliverability people, postmaster teams and spam filterers are going to look askance at you if you do what they consider weird stuff, and weird stuff includes making your sends comply only when sending to gmail.com and not to other Google-hosted domains.
My advice: Don't do that. Comply across the board and success will come much easier, both today and tomorrow.
(Need help complying with the new Yahoo/Google sender requirements? I've got you covered.)
Just a quick note today to address some bad advice I've seen out there in the wild.
The question that I've seen asked is this: The new Gmail sender requirements announced by Google -- do those apply only to mail sent to the individual mailboxes at the gmail.com and googlemail.com domains, or do they also apply to mail sent to any personal, company or corporate domains hosted by Google?
The bad advice is this: It applies to Gmail (only). Don't worry about it when sending to other email domains hosted by Google, like wombatmail.com.
Why is this bad advice? Because it's sort of technically true, but a "don't worry about it" answer is REALLY shortsighted.
Why? Because some of us can read between the lines here and know that, while the new sender requirements mostly do apply to gmail.com and googlemail.com mailboxes only (today), Google is very likely working toward one goal of requiring full compliance to cover every mailbox they host.
They undoubtedly have contractual requirements and technical complexities around hosted domain mail, so it is fair to theorize that Google Workspace mail is not a simple homogenous group of mailboxes all across their systems. It's big, it's complex, it's configurable, it can interface with various BEC (Business Enterprise Compromise)-preventing security systems and spam filters, and can do more with mail routing, processing and filtering than is done with the regular consumer Gmail user mailboxes.
But that doesn't mean that Google doesn't want all mail to comply with best practices. Nor does it imply that they're never going to attempt to apply best practice requirements the whole way across all of their systems. Just that they haven't done it yet.
While there could continue to be a compliance variance across the Google Workspace/Gmail consumer mailbox landscape, making sure all your mail complies with the current Google updated requirements means that your configuration will be future proof, is aligned with best practices, is compatible with multiple mailbox providers beyond Gmail, and makes it every slightly more likely that Google will look kindly upon you if you ever have a deliverability issue that requires that you beg them for assistance or consideration.
Historically, mailbox providers and blocklist providers have taken a dim view of senders that target infrastructure settings or compliance requirements to only specific mailbox providers. Because this is almost always related to some sort of bad practice or unwanted mail. In the past, some not-so-great senders would dedicate servers and IP addresses to send mail only to Yahoo or only to Microsoft or only to Google. Besides the strong implication that somebody doing this is a bad actor (because you could rarely, if ever, find good guys engaging in this sort of thing), it impedes the ability for receiving systems and spam filters to better understand your sending reputation. At a very simplistic level, consider that if your IPs only send mail to Yahoo, you won't have any Microsoft SNDS feedback data to rely on for those IP addresses.
That's a bit extreme; but I wanted to help make it clear why deliverability people, postmaster teams and spam filterers are going to look askance at you if you do what they consider weird stuff, and weird stuff includes making your sends comply only when sending to gmail.com and not to other Google-hosted domains.
My advice: Don't do that. Comply across the board and success will come much easier, both today and tomorrow.
(Need help complying with the new Yahoo/Google sender requirements? I've got you covered.)
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