• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, January 10, 2024

Email marketers have until Feb. 1 to comply with new rules from Gmail and Yahoo Mail. But many are not ready, judging by a new study from Red Sift.

The top-line finding is that 91.38% of domains globally fail to meet the new requirements. But that has to be placed in context: Not all are email sending domains. 

Publicly traded companies (a proxy for enterprise senders) do better: only 33% have no DMARC records, meaning they will fail to meet the new standards.

U.S. companies are in the best shape, compared to firms in other countries: Only 6.52% in the U.S. will fail the Google and Yahoo tests. And 75% would likely pass, compared to a global average of 39.87%. 

In contrast to the U.S., the expected failure rate is 50% in Japan, 50% in Korea, 47.92% in Indonesia, 45.71% in Austria and 39.18% in Spain.  

Lower fail rates are expected in Australia (10.78%), France (10.47%), Canada (12.37%) and the U.K. (14.58%). 

Here’s another way to look at readiness, based on market indices. These percentages will fail in February: 

• CAC 40 (France) — 7.50%
• S&P 500 (U.S.) — 8.8% 
• Fortune 500 (U.S.) — 9.22% 
• DAX (Germany) — 10% 
• FTSE 100 (U.K.) — 15%
• Euronext150 — 18.92%
• FTSE 250 (U.K.) — 21.31%

One thing to note about methodology: Red Sift uses a tool that assesses DMARC and BIMI adoption of 70 million domains worldwide. But Red Sift concedes that since it is only looking at static DNS records, it does not provide complete visibility into which domains would fully pass Google and Yahoo’s requirements. 

The new guidelines require that outgoing email by bulk senders (those sending at least 5,000 emails in a 24-hour period) adhere to the rules.. By April, they must comply or risk being blocked. 

Red Sift describes the rules as follows:

1. Authenticate the domains you send from
2. Make it easy for people to stop receiving your emails
3. Don’t spam

Of course, the authentication rules are much more complicated:

• Publishing a DMARC policy for each domain that sends mail with at least a policy of “none”
• Setting up SPF and DKIM for each domain that sends mail. Note that both SPF and DKIM are required, unlike with DMARC, which only requires one or the other.
• Aligning the domain in the sender's 'From:' header with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain (for direct mail only).
• Ensuring that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records using a Forward Confirmed DNS (FcrDNS).