Email sender guidelines FAQ

Bulk senders are email senders that send close to 5,000 or more messages (with the same domain in the From: header) within a 24-hour period. Senders who have sent close to 5000 messages in a 24-period 1 or more times are considered bulk senders.

Bulk senders should use Postmaster Tools to check that their email practices are following our Email sender guidelines. To learn more, visit our Email sender requirements & Postmaster Tools FAQ.

The Email sender guidelines don’t apply to messages sent to Google Workspace accounts. Sender requirements and Google enforcement apply only when sending email to personal Gmail accounts.

All senders, including Google Workspace users, must meet the requirements in our Email sender guidelines when sending messages to personal Gmail accounts. The requirements don’t apply to Google Workspace inbound and intra-domain messages.

To ensure messages are delivered as expected, bulk senders should comply with our Email sender guidelines. If senders don’t meet these requirements, messages might be rejected or delivered to recipients’ spam folders.

Yes, when messages are rejected, we send a rejection code and a reason for the rejection. You can also see this information in Postmaster Tools.

Spam rate is calculated daily. To help ensure messages are delivered as expected, senders should keep their spam rate below 0.1% and should prevent spam rates from ever reaching 0.3% or higher, as described in our Email sender guidelines.

Currently, spam rates greater than 0.1% have a negative impact on email inbox delivery. Keep your spam rate below 0.1% and prevent spam rates from ever reaching 0.3% or higher. Spam rate impact is graduated, and spam rates of 0.3% or higher have an even greater negative impact on email inbox delivery. You can monitor your spam rate with Postmaster Tools.

Starting in February 2024, senders with a user-reported spam rate greater than 0.3% aren't eligible for mitigations.

No. One-click unsubscribe is required only for commercial, promotional messages. Transactional messages are excluded from this requirement. Some examples of transactional messages are password reset messages, reservation confirmations, and form submission confirmations.

Senders that already include an unsubscribe link in their messages have until June 1st 2024 to implement one-click subscribe in all commercial messages.

No. One-click unsubscribe should be implemented according to RFC 8058. Including a mailto link in the body of your messages doesn’t meet our one-click unsubscribe requirement.

If your unsubscribe link isn’t working for an extended period of time, your messages won’t meet our one-click unsubscribe requirement. These messages won’t be marked as spam, but senders aren’t eligible for mitigations for email delivery issues.

We recommend senders follow the specifications for one-click unsubscribe that are defined in RFC 8058. Email admins should use this specification as the reference for implementing one-click unsubscribe. One-click unsubscribe links that go to a landing or other type of web page don’t comply with RFC 8058.

For messages sent directly to personal Gmail accounts, the domain in the sender From: header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. 

To ensure reliable authentication, we recommend all senders fully align DMARC to both SPF and DKIM. It’s likely that DMARC alignment with both SPF and DKIM will eventually be a sender requirement. Learn more about DMARC alignment.

If messages fail DMARC because of authentication or alignment issues, the enforcement defined in the sending domain’s DMARC policy generally applies. If the sending domain doesn’t have a DMARC policy, the messages might be rejected or sent to spam. Failing DMARC authentication is one of several factors that determine whether messages are rejected, sent to spam, or delivered as expected. DMARC authentication is an important determining factor, and so these messages are typically handled based on the enforcement setting in the sending domain’s DMARC policy. Learn more about DMARC policies and enforcement options.

Bulk senders that meet all the requirements described in our Email sender guidelinescan submit an escalation for email delivery issues. Before contacting tech support, make sure you’re following all sender guidelines. Starting in February 2024, we won’t provide mitigations for email delivery issues to senders that don’t meet the guidelines. For details about mitigation requests, visit the Sender contact form.