Bulk Email Sender Guidelines and Setup When Using the Race Roster Email Campaign Tool

Effective February 2024, Google and Yahoo enforce strict requirements for bulk email senders. A bulk sender is any domain that sends more than 5000 emails to a Google or Yahoo inbox in a single day. The requirements are DNS records. Starting September 2024, the records can be made available to you through the email campaign tool interface.

This article serves as a guide for dealing with these changes and ensuring optimal email deliverability for event organizers using their own domain to send email campaigns on Race Roster. Part 1 provides background information. Part 2 is the step-by-step setup on the event dashboard.

PART 1: Background info

Google and Yahoo have both published full details on the 2024 changes. 

What are the new requirements?

1. Email authentication
   • SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records must be implemented
2. Maintain low spam complaint rates
   • Spam rates should stay below 0.3%
3. Implement easy-unsubscribe
   • Include list-unsubscribe header and unsubscribe link
   • Honor unsubscribes within 2 days

Who qualifies as having a bulk sender?

Email senders that send, or have sent, more than 5,000 emails from their own domain in a single day to Google or Yahoo email addresses are considered "bulk senders". There is no expiration on the classification as a bulk sender once the 5,000 email threshold is exceeded. Starting then, your domain will be marked as a bulk sender permanently and, hence, will require authentication and compliance.

Authentication

SPF: A sender policy framework (SPF) record is a type of DNS TXT record that lists all the servers authorized to send email from a particular domain.

DKIM : DomainKeys (DKIM) is a method of email authentication that helps prevent spammers and other malicious parties from impersonating a legitimate domain. For example, a malicious party using a company's custom domain attempting to gain access to confidential company information.

DMARC: DMARC records protect domains from sending unauthorized emails. For more information on how to set up DMARC records, please see the following sources of documentation:

• Google: Define your DMARC
• Google: Add your DMARC record

Note: A domain must have SPF and DKIM records properly configured before a DMARC record can be validated.

All of these records are generated through Amazon SES and can be provided through the event dashboard by visiting Email campaigns > Senders > Manage domains.

Low spam-complaint rates

Spam complaint rates must remain below 0.3% to stay compliant with the new bulk email sender requirements. To monitor these complaint rates, a domain’s reputation, and other useful details such as authentication rates, we encourage you to visit the following services:

1. Google: Postmaster Tools
2. Yahoo: Sender Hub Dashboard

Yahoo and Google also publish recommended sending practices to help maintain a low spam-complaint rate.

1. Google: Email Sender Guidelines (Recommended sending practices)
2. Yahoo: Sender Requirements and Recommendations

PART 2: Setup

What do I need to do to stay compliant?

 After creating and verifying a sender for use in Race Roster email campaigns, follow these steps.

1. From the Senders tab on the event's email campaign settings page, click "Manage domains".

2. Next, on the Domains page, you will see a list of relevant email sender domains. What appears on this list is dependent on:

• email senders that you have created and verified while signed into the current Race Roster user account
• the email sender domain being identified as custom; for example, if one of your email senders is yourname@yahoo.com, then @yahoo.com will not appear on the list because it belongs to a common email server not requiring domain authentication

The status column indicates if the custom domain is verified, pending, or unverified. If you find that one of the listed domains is already verified (for example, because someone else from your company/organization already completed the authentication process), no further action is required. For pending and unverified email sender domains, click its corresponding "Manage domain" hyperlink in the action column.

3. You will land on a page containing the DNS records for the sender domain. From here, you can copy all relevant names and values to provide to your web domain manager. You may need to contact your Information Technology department/administrator to complete any steps moving forward from here.

If you have any other questions concerning the authentication process of your domain/bulk sender, please email us at director@raceroster.com