February 2024 Email Deliverability Updates

Heads up – there are some exciting developments underway to combat the influx of annoying SPAM in our inboxes, particularly at Google and Yahoo.

Spam messages accounted for over 45 percent of e-mail traffic in December 2022 with over 29% of global spam coming from Russia - https://www.statista.com/statistics/420391/spam-email-traffic-share/

Over 8 Billion spam emails in the US in January 2023. - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270488/spam-emails-sent-daily-by-country/

So, in order to help reduce the amount of SPAM for Google and Yahoo email users (and other providers likely to follow shortly) there are some new enforcement of email validation that are going into effect.

We’ve been helping clients with this since the Fall of 2023, but thought we’d post how to get started on figuring this out. We're here to help if needed.

1. See if your DNS includes an SPF record for your email provider and any other tools that send emails on your behalf. E.g. Office 365/Gmail, HubSpot, Mailchimp, ... any platform that sends emails that appear to be coming from your domain.
   1. Go to: https://mxtoolbox.com/spf.aspx
   2. Enter your email sending domain
   3. Confirm there are includes for your various providers:
      
   4. If not, get them added to your DNS
2. See if your email senders are set-up for DKIM – both your marketing email sender and your corporate email system.
   1. Go to: https://dmarcian.com/dkim-inspector
   2. Enter your domain name. E.g. HydroStudios.com
   3. Enter your selectors, for example:
      1. Office 365:
         • selector1
           
         • selector2
      2.  HubSpot:
         •  hs1
         • hs2
           
3. See if your email domain is set-up for DMARC
   1. Go to: https://dmarcian.com/dmarc-inspector/
   2. Enter your domain. E.g. HydroStudios.com