Legitimate mailers become collateral damage.

Google and Yahoo's new rules governing email sending will lead to an arms race between email providers and spammers. When conscientious email senders get caught up in a barrage of attacks, they become collateral damage.

The new rules focus on authenticating outgoing emails, limiting user-reported spam rates, and providing easy unsubscribes.

The stated goal of the new rules is laudable: to combat spam, phishing, and other malicious activity that undermines user trust in email. Requiring authentication and imposing a penalty for user-reported spam (it's unclear what that penalty is) should reduce the amount of unwanted and harmful email arriving in users' inboxes.

Additionally, these new measures increase email deliverability and open rates for legitimate marketers by giving users more confidence that the email they receive comes from a trusted source. Improving your email marketing practices will result in a better user experience and a more effective email strategy. By prioritizing quality over quantity, marketers can build stronger relationships with subscribers and ultimately produce better results.

But there are also more sinister interpretations. Platforms would greatly reduce the effectiveness of email marketing by mediating the relationship between email senders and recipients.

Marketers will be forced to move to more expensive channels such as PPC and display advertising. The channel is controlled and monetized by the very platforms behind the new rules for email delivery.

If you've been in digital marketing for any length of time, you've probably attended this rodeo.

Dig deeper: How to overcome (and learn from) your email marketing mistakes

spammers are not stopped

New email delivery rules won't stop malicious activity. They will find a way around it.

For example, use an email delivery service that sells rotating IP addresses or a tool that warms up hundreds, if not thousands, of email domains. Here we will discuss one such service.

[Bulk email brand X] offers high-performance, high-volume dedicated email servers that can send up to 1 million emails per day. Each server can have up to 255 dedicated IPs for sending email. Therefore, emails are quickly delivered to multiple recipients using rotating IPs.

Send up to 2 million emails per month for just $600. As your email volume increases, the price per email decreases. These services have been around for years. I found a Reddit thread dating back to 2016 discussing this practice.

Apparently, despite Google's efforts, bad actors are successfully delivering emails and have been for years. Even if email security can be circumvented, it is unlikely that Google or any single platform that relies on user monetization will be able to “solve the spam problem.”

Legitimate mailers become collateral damage.

Legitimate marketers will be affected by the new rules, whether intentionally or not. (Author's note: I won't discuss where the line is drawn between legitimate email and spam; that's a topic for another article.)

Costs will increase. Legitimate marketers will spend more to comply with the ever-changing rules of an increasingly fragmented email environment. These costs include staff time and software to authenticate sender identity and ensure compliance.

New rules just add more to an already complex environment. For many years, legitimate email senders have been influenced by an ecosystem mediated by email platforms (such as Google and Yahoo) and email clients, particularly Microsoft Outlook.

Google added a “Promotions” tab to its Gmail client in 2013 with the goal of better organizing the user experience. Since then, marketers have been trying to figure out how the algorithms that make that filtering happen, with little luck or insight.

By default, Microsoft Outlook does not load images included in emails from external sources. This can dramatically change the mailer's intended experience and possibly the results it achieves. Up until now, attempts to force users to change default settings have been futile.

Digging deeper: Why it's time to rethink your feedback emails and how to do it right

Google's checkered history of creating better experiences

Google's attempts to police the online user experience are littered with garbage. Core Web Vitals, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and AMP for Email are three examples. Website owners have invested time and money to implement and comply with each one. They were hoping for an advantage in his SEO rankings.

Google abandoned AMP a few years later, acknowledging that Core Web Vitals neither helped nor hindered SEO efforts. Many site owners felt misled. They are now skeptical about investing in compliance with Google's laws.

But Google isn't the only company changing the rules. For the past several years, email senders have relied on an alphabetical combination of authentication schemes (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.). All come with a learning curve and investment in implementation and monitoring.

What happens if these authentication methods become obsolete or are unilaterally removed by Google? As an industry, we've managed to reach agreement on protocols like TCP/IP and HTTPS, but when it comes to email… It didn't work.

We are all stowaways on this voyage.

As with other efforts mediated by Google and other platforms, we will continue to read information that determines email delivery indefinitely. I feel anxious when I don't have control. Efforts to ensure delivery are costly.

Here's what we've done so far to follow the “rules” as we understand them.

• Implement all available authentication schemes such as SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and even BIMI.
• We offer a one-click unsubscribe option.
• Create quality emails and promotions.
• Validate your code and content using third-party tools.
• Monitor soft and hard bounces for warning signs.
• Master Google Postmaster Tools to identify delivery penalties, even if you don't know what they will be.

You can also explore these and add your own. Also, be cautious and flexible and be prepared to navigate the uncharted waters of changing “rules” and technical complexity.