Spam emails range from advertisements for services you signed up for in 2019 and haven’t used since, to scams trying to trick you out of your savings, but spam of any kind is annoying – so Gmail- users may be excited to see the arrival of new protections that should help clean up your inbox.
These protective measures were announced in October last year and come in the form of: Guidelines for bulk email senders that Google introduced this month that force senders to follow certain formats, authenticate their domain, ensure the number of their emails marked as spam falls below certain thresholds, and don’t allow senders to impersonate other senders.
Perhaps most useful is a provision requiring bulk email senders to include a “prominent unsubscribe link” in their messages, and requiring users who click that link to unsubscribe within two days.
If senders violate these rules, Google will initially just send them error messages, but if the problems persist, Google will start rejecting a percentage of non-compliant emails in April. This rejection rate increases the longer senders adhere to the rules. , until Google starts blocking all emails that break the rules.
As for the one-click unsubscribe button, senders have until June 2024 to add it to all “commercial, promotional messages” before facing repercussions.
Bulk senders are classified as anyone who sends 5,000 or more messages to personal Gmail accounts in a 24-hour period. Once someone meets these criteria, he or she is considered a bulk email sender forever. To work around companies setting up multiple email accounts, the total will include all emails sent from the same root domain.
The upshot of all this is that your Gmail inbox should be a lot less cluttered or cluttered, and you’ll only see the emails you really want to see.
Will there be more spam protections?
In addition to these spam email guidelines, Google has also provided several suggestions for email senders on how to make their digital correspondence seem less spammy and annoying to recipients.
At this point, these aren’t hard and fast rules, and are mainly there to help senders reduce the chance of their emails being flagged, but if Google continues to combat spam, these recommendations could become requirements.
Additionally, while Google currently classifies bulk email senders as anyone who sends 5,000 or more emails per day, Google could lower this limit and extend the unsubscribe button and one-click authentication rules to other senders.
Google seems committed to its anti-spam campaign, saying its efforts so far have reduced the number of unverified emails received by Gmail users by 75%, so expect Google to roll out more email security in the future. And if you want to do more to reduce spam today, we have a guide on stopping unwanted email that you can check out for tips.