• by Allan Levy , September 1, 2025

When Google and Yahoo jointly announced new email deliverability rules last year, most marketers saw no cause for alarm. If anything, the proposed rules seemed like a potential boon: something that might filter out the most egregious spammers and thus make the messages of good-faith actors more visible.

Well, as roughly a million panicked Reddit posts can attest, things didn't quite play out that way. Very shortly after implementation, marketers watched in horror as carefully executed campaigns imploded, tumbling one by one into the void. A year's experience has dug some brands out of the trenches, but the struggle is still very much ongoing.

Below are four tips on how to increase email deliverability while minimizing the risk of penalization.

Figure out the kind of block you're dealing with. If your emails are failing to get through to their intended audience, you're likely dealing with one of two things: a hard block or a soft block.

If you've been hard-blocked, you likely know about it already, as you'll be receiving bounceback messages with specific error codes. Quite often, the block can be attributed to overzealous filtering. For instance: the mailbox provider might be mistaking you for a known bad actor.

In cases like these, your email service provider can be a valuable asset. Typically, they have relationships with the big mailbox providers and can advocate for your case.

Soft blocks are harder to get a handle on: if you're seeing lower opens or conversions, it could mean your emails are being sent to spam, but it's hard to know for sure. Using seeds to monitor deliverability can be a huge help in getting a handle on what problem you're dealing with.

Ramp volume up slowly, but not too slowly. If you discover that you’ve been soft-blocked by Gmail or Yahoo, your next step is to begin the process of domain recovery. 

Start by digging into your metrics. Figure out who your most engaged customers are and go out to them first. If you have an email list of 150,000 people, that might mean limiting yourself to only the 10,000 who have engaged with your emails in the last 10 days. As the right signals start flowing to the mailbox providers, you can gradually start to broaden your reach.

By week five or six, you should be getting fairly close to reintroducing all inactive segments (and even expanding beyond them).

Be careful about what you're saying. In the old days, marketers could simply avoid overtly spammy-sounding keywords (think: ACT NOW, URGENT RESPONSE REQUIRED, etc.) and be fairly confident their emails would reach their intended target. With the advent of AI and ultra-sophisticated semantic analysis, things have gotten more complicated. There is no more tricking the system: you have to be an honest broker.

This is, in a sense, good news. Customers never liked being manipulated, even if it occasionally resulted in a conversion. But it does mean certain kinds of content are now definitively off limits. For instance: blending receipt-type emails with marketing offers. Tempting as it might be to upsell at every available opportunity, the big mailbox providers will make you pay for it.

Always play by all the rules.  The topline rules of the game for bulk senders are well-known but worth repeating:

• Rule #1: Senders must authenticate their email with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
• Rule #2: Senders must make it easy to unsubscribe by including a one-click unsubscribe link (and honor opt-outs within two days)
• Rule #3: Senders must keep spam complaint rates under 0.3%

Stick carefully to these rules, and you'll save yourself the most serious trouble. But there are less-discussed changes that are just as important. For instance: Google now purges inactive accounts after 24 months, and Yahoo purges them after just 12. Too many hard bounces from inactive accounts can hurt your sender score. So make sure to cull your list the moment you receive a bounceback.