Is Your Author Newsletter Landing in Spam?
Or, what you need to know about the Google and Yahoo changes in February 2024
My dear writer,
Happy New Year! If you’re anything like me, the start of the new year is like the first day of school—your calendar’s a fresh slate, you’re excited to use your new planner and pens, and of course, that resolution list is growing by the minute. But this can also be a tough time of year to feel creative. January can seem like an overwhelming blank space. Or maybe you have so many goals and dreams that it’s hard to break the first task down and know where to start. Wherever you are this January, be kind to yourself. Take a deep breath.
Last January, my biggest goal was to start a newsletter to update friends and family about my writing journey. Setting up a newsletter is one of the best things you can do for yourself as a writer, even if you aren’t published yet. Arguably, it’s best to set one up before you’re published. Email marketing is the most direct way to connect to your audience and is one of the conversion actions of the marketing funnel you should be trying to capitalize on. You don’t even need a website before setting up a newsletter.
However, there are many rules and regulations when it comes to email marketing. These rules are good—they protect people from being spammed, and we all know we get more than enough daily emails—but they may be frustrating to work around if you’re the one trying to send out mass emails.
Why aren’t my followers receiving my newsletters?
This question was haunting me last month. While I don’t have many followers, I was proud that I’d doubled my contact list since my previous newsletter went out in July. I had a lot of exciting updates for my friends and family in December, but I wasn’t getting the kind of feedback I thought I would receive.
So what happened? It took some investigation with close friends to find that my newsletter had landed in their Spam folder—despite the fact that they were regular recipients a few months back. In less than a years’ time since I started my newsletter, I went from successful deliveries to landing in friends’ Spam boxes.
That’s because new Spam Protection regulations from Google and Yahoo are coming into effect (February 2024), requiring that all mass email senders authenticate their emails. This is intended to protect recipients and make them feel confident they are getting emails from legitimate sources.
None of these regulations are new concepts—they’ve been listed as “best practices” by Google for a while—but the difference is that these suggestions are now requirements.
“Okay, but this is confusing.” I hear you say. “What’s DKIM and DMARC? Isn’t SPF for sunscreen? Why hasn’t this mattered before? And most importantly—how do I fix it?”
If you’re experiencing a decrease in activity with your own newsletter, make sure you have these three things in place to validate your email marketing and start reaching your readers’ Inboxes again.
Three Steps to Email Authenticity
Use an email address under your own domain (i.e. Something that is NOT a free account like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.)
This is a question of legitimacy—can you prove that you are who you say you are? Signing up for free email providers like Gmail and Yahoo are great for your personal email, but that also means it’s incredibly easy for phishers and bad actors to create free emails and start spamming people. The way to establish yourself as a trustworthy source is by sending email campaigns from your own registered domain.
Even if you’ve been using a marketing platform with your personal email for a while, you might be affected by these new changes. For example, I started my personal newsletter last year on the platform Brevo and I signed up with my regular (free) Gmail account. That worked fine for me all last year, until suddenly I started seeing this notice in my campaign last December:
Source: Brevo So first thing’s first—stop using a free email account to send newsletters or mass correspondence. You need to set up an email that’s associated with your domain. If you don’t have a website domain, then start with my article here. Domain registrars like GoDaddy will let you purchase email as a domain service, or you can set up a Google business account. Both will cost money but that is the price for doing legitimate business. And you are legitimate!
Use a reputable marketing platform for sending newsletters
This should be obvious, but you can’t just blast 100+ people with emails from your own personal account. Sooner or later, you’ll get flagged for spam.
Using a reputable email marketing platform helps to prove your legitimacy. Mailchimp, Brevo, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact—there are so many platforms available today for this purpose. (I’ll talk about Substack separately at the end.) These larger companies take some of the regulations upon themselves to ensure that emails sent from their platforms are landing in Inboxes correctly.
Brevo did the work of alerting me to the upcoming Google and Yahoo requirements, provided support articles on how to proceed, and also gave me the exact records I needed to add to my domain DNS. In the end, it was a matter of copying/pasting. That’s the kind of service you get with a good marketing platform.Confirm with your domain registrar that SPF, DMARC, and DKIM are set up
Okay, what do all of these abbreviations mean? They are three types of authentication methods that email providers use to check for legitimate senders. Here’s how Google defines each of them:Sender Policy Framework (SPF): “Specifies the servers and domains that are authorized to send email on behalf of your organization.”
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): “Adds a digital signature to every outgoing message, which lets receiving servers verify the message actually came from your organization.”
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): “Lets you tell receiving servers what to do with outgoing messages from your organization that don’t pass SPF or DKIM.”
Each of these helps to establish your identity as a trustworthy source of email, and each should be added to your DNS records for your domain.
(Don’t know what DNS is? Check out these Web Terms Everyone Should Know for an easy definition)
As I stated earlier, check with your marketing platform first to see what they’ve provided to you for this transition. Brevo gave me two TXT files to add to my DNS records. I copied/pasted them and then went back to Brevo’s site to validate the changes.
If you feel uncertain about how to proceed with this step, I recommend contacting Support for your marketing platform and your domain registrar to get assistance, or check out any help articles they might have published. Each registrar will handle this a little differently.
If you feel pretty confident in your technical skills, you can add these authentication protocols yourself if you have access to your DNS management tools.
Here are some general support guidelines provided by Google and Microsoft:
If you’re using Google Business for email:
Google: Add your SPF record to your domain
Google: Turn on DKIM for your domain
Google: Add your DMARC record
If you’re using Microsoft 365 for email:
Microsoft: Set up SPF
Microsoft: Set up DKIM
Microsoft: Set up DMARC
A bonus step: you can register your domain through Google Postmaster tools to get report data on how your emails are performing for Gmail recipients.
Let’s Talk About Substack
If you’re thinking to yourself, Substack seems to be quiet about this February 2024 panic… that’s because Substack has already taken care of everything I’ve written above.
I know it may seem silly to write a Substack post about newsletters where all of the advice is not geared toward Substack users. But I wanted to arm you with the knowledge of how email marketing works so that you understand why Substack is an exception. Knowledge is power!
(I also don’t want to assume that all of you are using Substack—if I am using two different newsletter platforms for two different reasons, then surely someone else is, too!)
Quite simply, Substack is taking this pressure off the user because Substack provides you with a validated email using their domain name. So anytime you send a Substack newsletter, you are sending it from your username @ substack.com address, which they are managing. If you don’t believe me, go check your latest post or find another in your email inbox. Here’s a screenshot from my last Substack newsletter:
Even though that’s not the email address I used when I registered for Substack, that’s what they have created for my user account here. Pretty cool, right? You Substack users can let out a deep sigh of relief!
My dear writer, do you have other questions about email marketing or how to set up your own newsletter? Do you want more content like this? How can I best help you in 2024? Answer the poll below or leave a comment so that I can best support you!
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