Industry News

Beginning September 2026 Google will allow qualifying US political senders to enroll their domains in the Gmail Verified Sender Program. The program requires that the sender follow existing bulk sender guidelines, use Google Postmaster Tools, and not send spam. In return Gmail’s filters will treat the sender differently. Background In 2022 an academic paper1 was published which concluded that message filters exhibited political bias during the 2020 (US) election. It didn’t matter that the paper conflated the supposed bias with normal filter operations or that it found that bias was not uniformly in favor of one party. The genie was out of the bottle. Legislation was proposed2 which would compel filter operators to exclude political messages from decision making algorithms; messages could still be manually blocked or marked as spam by the recipient. ...

Google recently proposed a new method for verifying that an email address exists without sending a verification message to the address. They are calling it the Email Verification Protocol and there is an associated Internet Draft. The idea is that the verification process all happens within the web browser at the point of address submission instead of being split between the website and wherever email lives. Not using email to verify the validity of an address removes friction such as sending delays and message filtering false-positives. ...

RFC 8619 was published in July 2019 with the status of Experimental and describes the Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) protocol. On 16 April 2026 the DMARC Working Group (who originated ARC) voted to re-charter the group for the sole purpose of changing the status of the RFC to Historic and declaring the ARC experiment concluded. I was one of those who voted in favor. The WG has six months to agree on actually doing this. If successful then there will be no further updates to the specification and deployment will not be recommended. ...

The DKIM Working Group are developing a spiritual successor to DKIM. They have named it DKIM2 but it is more of its own thing than an iterative new version of the original DKIM protocol. As of now (June 2026) it is still going through the drafting process so there is no RFC or stable specification to develop against. Ideas are still being stress tested and edge cases considered. The latest Internet-Draft can be viewed here and there is also an explanatory website operated by the WG here. ...

The original DMARC specification was published back in March 2015 as RFC 7489 and had a status of “Informational”. A new revision published in May 2026 breaks the specification into multiple RFCs and has a status of “Proposed standard”. This is the first step to becoming an Internet Standard. The new DMARC RFCs: RFC 9989 - core protocol specification RFC 9990 - aggregate reporting specification RFC 9991 - failure reporting specification In the approximately ten years between these two revisions the specification has been refined but not radically altered. The updated specification is fully backward compatible with the previous one. ...

2024 Update: Gmail and Yahoo! Change Their Sending Requirements Last updated: 10 August 2024 Refer to Chapter 8 (Sender Reputation) and Chapter 11 (Email Authentication) of Email Deliverability Explained (2nd edition) for background information on topics discussed in this post. Back in October 2023 Google and Yahoo! simultaneously announced that they would begin enforcing new requirements for bulk senders from February 2024 onwards. By June 2024 all of the new requirements are officially being enforced. ...