Venture Blog

What Does This Mean for Email Senders in the Bulk Category?

If a company is using a partner like Venture Solutions as their email vendor, then part of the problem has probably already been solved with DKIM and SPF records already in place. However, to maintain a good deliverability rate and preserve good standing as a sender, companies will need to be sure they have a plan for the DMARC part of the equation:

• DMARC is an email security standard that allows domain owners to monitor who’s sending email using their domain and instructs email receivers (like Gmail) to approve, quarantine, or reject emails that aren’t sent from an authenticated source. DMARC records are not required for verifying your domain authentication, but they will establish a policy that receivers can use to determine your DMARC preferences. The simplest policy is ‘v=DMARC1; p=none’; however, the client’s organization may have stricter requirements.
• Email senders will need to send a TXT record in the form of a CNAME record to their email sending domain’s host. If the sender is using a partner like Venture Solutions as their DNS host, that partner will take care of sending the CNAME record information on behalf of their client.
• It is possible that DMARC is already in place. Senders should verify with their DNS host if a DMARC policy already exists.

Bulk email senders should closely monitor their spam rate using resources like Google Postmaster Tools. Vendors like Venture Solutions can see spam reports from most inbox providers, but Gmail is a bit of a special case. Since Gmail doesn’t provide a feedback loop—that’s the process for sharing spam report data with email providers—clients will have to register their domain with a dedicated service like Google’s Postmaster Tools.

Transactional emails like those Venture Solutions sends on behalf of our clients are not subject to an unsubscribe option. These are emails that are triggered by a user’s interaction with a website or application. To make sure these transactional emails do not fall within the bounds of these new requirements, senders should ensure that the content of the email is relevant to the user’s transaction and does not contain unrelated marketing material.

Additionally, research on this topic suggests that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records:

• Reverse DNS records apply to sending domains that have a dedicated IP.
• For every PTR record there should be a valid A record. An A record maps a domain to the IP address.
• PTR records are stored under the IP address reversed, with “.in-addr.arpa” added. For example, the PTR record for the IP address 192.0.2.255 would be stored under ‘255.2.0.192.in-addr.arpa’.

What Is the Risk to Bulk Email Senders If the Deadline Is Not Met?

Impacted senders should collaborate with their email service providers to ensure the new requirements are met immediately. The risk of not doing so is that email deliverability rates can decrease significantly if the new consumer protection rules are not followed. It is important for both the client and vendor to maintain their delivery credibility to remain complaint and to meet contractual agreements.

If you have a question about these new email requirements or how to proceed, feel free to reach out to us. Our team of email experts are happy to connect with you to form a plan.