To further combat phishing and protect users of electronic mail, Google and Yahoo are introducing changes to email sending. The changes take effect from February 1st and concern requirements that a message sender must meet so that their email sent to Gmail and Yahoo accounts does not end up in spam or get rejected. The changes apply to senders sending 5,000 emails per day.
See also: How Google describes the changes and requirements introduced from February 1
As far as Sugester is concerned, nothing changes for you as a user of our system - you do not need to change or configure anything in your Sugester account.
The only thing to keep in mind, and we especially want to draw your attention to this, is to have SPF and DKIM records set for your domain.
The SPF record has long been a "must have" for email deliverability and protecting your domain reputation. Under the changes announced by Google, the DKIM protocol also becomes mandatory from now on. While this currently applies to senders sending more than 5,000 emails per day, some sources already suggest that DKIM will soon be required of everyone who wants to send emails to Gmail without issues.
Therefore, in addition to the mandatory SPF authentication, we also recommend setting up DKIM for your domain. This will increase the security of your email correspondence, reduce the number of emails landing in spam, and better protect against phishing.
As a further step, it is also worth considering DMARC, which Google is already mentioning.
In Sugester, we standardly attach our DKIM to all sent messages. However, to further increase the effectiveness of your email delivery, we can configure a dedicated DKIM together with your own sending server. In this case, messages will be sent and signed using your domain (option available from the PRO plan).
If you are not certain about your settings, whether SPF and DKIM are configured or not, we recommend a simple tool to check - Mxtoolbox.
If you want to check whether your SPF is correctly configured, for example:
If everything is configured correctly, you will see a green entry similar to the one below. Remember to check that records are set for all servers you use, including Sugester (if you send emails through our servers). You can check the DKIM record the same way by selecting DKIM Lookup from the list.
