Google has announced that
"Starting in 2024, we’ll require bulk senders to authenticate their emails, allow for easy unsubscription and stay under a reported spam threshold. "
New requirements for bulk senders
By February 2024, Gmail will start to require that bulk senders:
- Authenticate their email: You shouldn’t need to worry about the intricacies of email security standards, but you should be able to confidently rely on an email’s source. So we're requiring those who send significant volumes to strongly authenticate their emails following well-established best practices. Ultimately, this will close loopholes exploited by attackers that threaten everyone who uses email.
- Enable easy unsubscription: You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to stop receiving unwanted messages from a particular email sender. It should take one click. So we’re requiring that large senders give Gmail recipients the ability to unsubscribe from commercial email in one click, and that they process unsubscription requests within two days. We’ve built these requirements on open standards so that once senders implement them, everyone who uses email benefits.
- Ensure they’re sending wanted email: Nobody likes spam, and Gmail already includes many tools that keep unwanted messages out of your inbox. To add yet another protection, moving forward, we’ll enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under to ensure Gmail recipients aren’t bombard ed with unwanted messages. This is an industry first, and as a result, you should see even less spam in your inbox.
Evaluation of how this affects us
Of the 3 top level items 2 are in the fr-ops realm and I believe that we are covered - ie
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k - We just need @Dwisehaupt
/ @Jgreen to confirm there are no items on there that we are missing / whether there are any
additional tasks around the spam rates
The last item is the one-click unsubscribe. This requires us to have both of these headers in affected emails
List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click List-Unsubscribe: <https://solarmora.com/unsubscribe/example>
In order to implement this we need to
- create a page that responds to a GET or POST url on one-click. There is no need to render content
if we are only going to use it in the header.
- determine which emails need to have one-click unsubscribes
- add the header to suitable emails
These are the types of emails we send
- Bulk mailings via Acoustic - high volume
- Donation related automated emails (ThankYou, FailureRetry etc) - high volume
- Ad hoc emails via the UI (we permit up to 2000 per send now)
- CiviMail (not currently used but intended to replace Ad hoc emails in our usage)
Which emails need one-click-unsubscribe
The Acoustic emails are handled by them (and have the link) and we consideration of the CiviMail & ad hoc is probably a follow up.
The more significant question is the thank you emails. We currently do attach a List-unsubscribe header to our
thank you emails - based on the function build_unsub_link - however, this is not 1-click and there is no POST action.
Google specifies that
"Marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. "
This would seem to exclude our thank emails - but do we trust Google to discern the difference. Presumably past-us did not & hence we already have a header & a unsubscribe link - which would make the case for updating what is there. Although on the call we were not sure if we need to it's hard to argue the downside.
Our existing in-text url is the same it seems as the list header one - if that worked with 1 click via GET or POST then that would be an acceptable solution - we could add a 1-click to the url if want to differentiate but I see other providers seem to work off one-click & then offer more options off the back of that
The existing link is (like) https://payments.wikimedia.org/index.php/Special:FundraiserUnsubscribe?p=thankyou&e=barb%40testing.net&h=62591b4adc55494ebdeb8493f853dc21eaaa52f2&uselang=
Links
https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/core/-/issues/4641
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k