Understanding the “Enable Easy Unsubscription” Requirement - Google & Yahoo Initiative

[Asher]

UPDATE (Dec 22, 2023): Easy One-Click Unsubscribe Enforcement Delayed until June, 2024)

As part of our series on the new standards set by Google and Yahoo for bulk email senders, our focus here is on the “Enable Easy Unsubscription” requirement. It’s crucial for maintaining a healthy relationship with your email recipients and ensuring compliance.

Why Easy Unsubscription Matters:

• Reduce Spam Reports: Sending emails only to those who want to receive them reduces the likelihood of being marked as spam.
• Protect Domain Reputation: Frequent spam reports can lower your domain’s reputation, affecting email deliverability. Monitor this using tools like Google’s Postmaster Tools.
• Improve Engagement Rates: Making it easy for recipients to unsubscribe can improve your open and click-through rates.

Key Unsubscription Practices:

1. Ensure Opt-In Subscription:
   • Confirm email addresses before adding to your list.
   • Consider removing inactive users who don’t engage with your emails.
   • Regularly validate that recipients wish to remain subscribed.
2. Implement One-Click Unsubscribe (For bulk senders):
   • Include specific headers in your emails to enable on-click unsubscribe as per RFC 8058.
   • Ensure the process is immediate and straightforward, without requiring a user login.
3. Additional Unsubscribe Methods:
   • Allow recipients to manage their subscriptions to different mailing lists.
   • Automatically unsubscribe recipients with multiple bounced messages.

Why It Matters:

By enabling easy unsubscription options, you respect your recipients’ preferences, adhere to best email practices, and maintain the integrity of your email campaigns.

Next Steps:

Review your current email setup or the capabilities of the service provider you use for sending your email campaigns to ensure these practices are in place.

Further Information:

Understanding the Gmail and Yahoo DMARC Requirements [dmarcian]
Announcement [Yahoo]
Announcement [Google]
A Crash Course on List Unsubscribe [spamresource.com]
The Email Marketers Guide to Using List-Unsubscribe [litmus.com]
5 Reasons Why You Need List-Unsubscribe in Your Email Life [kickbox.com]

[David]

“If you send more than 5,000 message per day, your marketing and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe.”

What’s your take on this situation? A sender sends 5,000+ messages per day, but not for purposes of marketing, and as one-off messages (no subscription). You think the unsubscribe requirement will apply to that sender or not?

The specific use case I’m curious about is school districts sending emails to their students and parents. Especially to communicate issues of safety–school cancellation due to weather emergency, fire in the building, school shooting, etc. That’s not the sort of communication folks can afford to unsubscribe to and miss.

I discussed this question with Google Workspace level 1 support, and came away with the hazy impression that Google has an algorithm that either does or doesn’t consider a message to be marketing, and if it does consider it to be marketing, the requirement applies. But Google’s support also shared enough info that was directly in conflict with their documented sender guidelines that I’m not confident any of that is accurate.

[dan_prime]

Hello David,

You pose an interesting scenario and have reason to explore the guidance provided a bit further. The spirit of the sender requirements is to give recipients the option to stop receiving a message. Where adding a unsubscribe mechanism to an important safety notice may not fit squarely in to ‘bulk’ sending (non-marketing/subscription), it remains a best practice, regardless of message type, frequency or rate of these messages. If the concern is that a parent may mistakingly unsubscribe and not see future alerts, it may be a worthwhile trade off from having wholesale delivery issues to the entire list/segment.

I hope this helps.