Are You Ready for the Strict Email Acceptance Rules at Google and Yahoo?

Email Authentication: Are You Ready for the Strict Email Acceptance Rules at Google and Yahoo?

From February 2024, the world's two largest email infrastructure providers, Google and Yahoo, began enforcing security verification mechanisms when accepting mail — mechanisms every company should in fact already have configured or corrected. These are the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks, verification mechanisms capable of blocking the great majority of malicious mail traffic. The platforms have announced in advance what state these security configurations must be in, and under which conditions.

- If you send fewer than 5,000 messages a day to the Google and Yahoo platforms, either your SPF or your DKIM record must be correctly and properly configured. In addition, the reverse DNS records for your mail domain IP addresses — what we call PTR records — must resolve correctly.

- If you send more than 5,000 messages a day to the Google and Yahoo platforms, both your SPF and your DKIM records must be correctly and properly configured. Having your DMARC policy in place and properly configured is also one of the required conditions. Again, the reverse DNS (PTR) records for your mail domain IP addresses must resolve correctly.

The critical question: what happens to my company if I do not correct these records?

Put simply, if these mail verification security requirements are not met on your company's behalf, you will experience serious disruption when sending mail to Gmail (Google) and Yahoo accounts. If you send more than 5,000 messages a day and have significant business processes depending on those sends, you will face serious disruption to your daily operations in whichever sector you work in. For that reason, configuring or correcting the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records of your company's mail domains according to the stated requirements is vital to the continuity of your business processes over the Google and Yahoo mail platforms.