Gmail ramps up enforcement of the new sender requirements

In 2024, Google announced new sender requirements for organizations sending emails to Gmail addresses (@gmail.com and @googlemail.com).

In November 2025, Google announced that it would intensify enforcement of these sender requirements:

Starting November 2025, Gmail is ramping up its enforcement on non-compliant traffic. Messages that fail to meet the email sender requirements will experience disruptions, including temporary and permanent rejections.

You can find detailed information about the new requirements in our blog post, or in the summary below.

Requirements for all senders

All senders must comply with the following rules:

• SPF or DKIM authentication must be configured, at a minimum.
• Spam complaints must be kept below 0.3%.
• The sending IP must match the IP associated to the reverse domain (forward-confirmed reverse DNS).
• Email delivery to Google should happen over an encrypted TLS connection.
• You won’t be able to send emails from @gmail.com addresses outside of Gmail anymore, as Gmail will begin to enforce a DMARC policy of quarantine to prevent this.
• Forwarding services should use ARC (Authenticated Receiver Chain), while mailing list software should add a List-Id header to email messages.

Requirements for bulk senders

Email senders who send more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail accounts are subject to additional requirements.

In addition to the requirements for all senders mentioned above, bulk senders must:

• Implement both SPF and DKIM.
• Set up DMARC authentication and alignment, and publish a record with a policy of at least p=none.
• Enable one-click unsubscribes with the List-Unsubscribe header.

Google also recommends that you setup DMARC reporting, a feature of DMARC that allows to collect delivery reports to ease troubleshooting of email authentication issues.

How to comply with the new requirements

Regardless of whether you’re a bulk sender or not, these email requirements affect you.

Before doing anything, it’s a good idea to get a sense of your current email sending setup: you can use a mail checker tool, combined with DMARC reporting, to understand the compliance level of your email sending configuration.

Then, go through the sender requirements and verify that all your sending sources are compliant with Google’s requirements. Ensure that SPF, DKIM and DMARC are not only configured, but also configured in a way that guarantees DMARC alignment.

Plus, the obvious part: don’t send spam or unsolicited mail and keep an eye on your spam complaint rate through the Gmail Postmaster Tools.