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Will the bulk sender rules reject you?

Measured against what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft now require. Everything checkable from DNS is checked; everything that is not is labelled, not guessed.

Judged against the published Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sender guidelines

Measured against the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sender rules. Free, no signup.

Symptoms

Mail that used to deliver starts bouncing with a permanent error, usually all at once and usually to one provider. Bulk campaigns are refused while individual replies still arrive. Nothing in your setup changed. The requirements did.

Diagnosis

The large receivers agreed a shared baseline and now enforce it. It splits into two tiers.

Every sender

  • SPF or DKIM authentication
  • Valid forward and reverse DNS on sending IPs
  • TLS on transmission
  • Correctly formatted messages

Bulk senders, roughly 5,000 a day and up

  • SPF and DKIM
  • A published DMARC policy, at minimum p=none
  • The From domain aligned with SPF or DKIM
  • One-click unsubscribe in marketing mail
  • Spam complaints below 0.3%

Four of those cannot be determined from DNS by anyone. We mark them as unverifiable and point you at who can actually tell you, rather than counting them as passes to make the score look better.

Cure

  1. Publish and validate SPF and DKIM for every service that sends on your behalf.
  2. Publish DMARC, read the reports, and fix whatever fails alignment.
  3. Fix reverse DNS on any machine you run yourself.
  4. Confirm the three invisible ones with your sending platform and Postmaster Tools.

Questions people actually ask

Who has to meet these requirements?

Everyone sending to Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook, with a stricter set for anyone sending more than about 5,000 messages a day to a single provider. The bulk threshold is per provider, and it is easier to cross than most senders expect.

What happens if I do not meet them?

Rejection, not filtering. Gmail returns permanent 550 errors for non-compliant bulk mail rather than quietly moving it to spam, so the failure is loud and immediate.

Why do some items say "not checkable"?

Because they genuinely are not visible from DNS. Whether your platform negotiates TLS, whether your campaigns carry one-click unsubscribe headers, and what your spam-complaint rate is, are all facts no external tool can read. We say so rather than showing a green tick we have not earned.

How do I see my spam complaint rate?

Google Postmaster Tools, free, for Gmail; Microsoft SNDS for Outlook. If you send in volume and are not watching one of these, start there, the 0.3% threshold is measured by them, not by you.

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