Google

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. ...

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. ...