A deep dive into email deliverability in 2024

On October 3, 2023, Google and Yahoo announced upcoming email security standards to prevent spam, phishing and malware attempts. Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) is also enforcing these policies.

With the big 3 Email Service Providers (ESP) in agreement, expect widespread adoption soon. Today's threats are more complex than ever and more ESPs will begin tightening the reigns. Failure to comply with these guidelines will result in emails being blocked beginning April 2024.

In this article, we're going to cover these guidelines and explain what senders must do in order to achieve and maintain compliance.

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Some of these changes - most of them impact bulk senders and spammers - should've been implemented ages ago, but seeing them being pushed by the three major email providers, who all happened to be owned, of course, by massive corporations, does raise quite a few red flags. Instinctively, this makes me worried about ulterior motives, especially since running your own email server is already fraught with issues due to the nebulous ways Gmail treats emails coming from small servers.

With the rising interest in self-hosting and things like Mastodon, I hope we're also going to see a resurgence in hosting your own e-mail. I really don't like that all my email is going through Gmail - it's what OSNews uses - but I don't feel like dealing with all the delivery issues people who try self-hosting email lament about. With a possible renewed wave of interest in it, we might be able to make the process easier and more reliable.