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How does this interact with transactional emails / 2FA / password resets? If 5000 people request a 2fa code in a month, I have to give them a unsubscribe header

How does this interact with transactional emails / 2FA / password resets? If 5000 people request a 2fa code in a month, I have to give them a unsubscribe header as well? Or magic login links? If I don't provide a list-unsubscribe header: do these emails then get blocked and noone can log in ? If I provide a list-unsubscribe header, what is the expected behaviour if they do click the Unsubscribe button? - tell them they can't unsubscribe to this email because it's needed to accomplish what they want to do in the future? - delete their account? what if it's a bank account or something like that? Would appreciate some clarify from Google at least...

ahoka 3y ago
Also forcing people to click on opaque links in random emails cannot end good.
mrtesthah 3y ago
Well the answer of course is for google to clone the unique features of your service and classify your site and its outgoing emails as spam.
trawls14 3y ago
Our (Postmark's) take is that while these changes are explicitly for marketing/bulk email senders, they are coming for transactional emails as well sooner or later: https://postmarkapp.com/blog/2024-gmail-yahoo-email-requirements https://postmarkapp.com/blog/2024-gmail-yahoo-email-requirem...
orliesaurus 3y ago
You're talking about Transactional emails? You cant unsubscribe from TRANSACTIONAL emails. That's why they're transactional...not marketing. It's really important to differentiate that.
- darylteo 3y ago
  I "know" that. I'm asking how does Google differentiate between a transactional and a non transactional email? They also say in their guidelines > *Marketing messages and subscribed messages* must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. So how is Google determining what is a Marketing/Subscribed message? If they're not, then am I required to tack on this header to ALL emails regardless of type or risk getting binned?
  - orliesaurus 3y ago
    Ahhh I see what you mean now, but it wasn't clear in your initial question. Gmail's algorithms analyzes, and has been doing over the last ~20 years, a combination of factors to classify emails as promotional or transactional! Nothing in the code itself of your email will indicate that, other than the presence of an unsub link + the rest of the footer (which is the obvious sign that's a marketing email)
  - jcrites 3y ago
    If you’re sending transactional emails like password resets or MFA, then the emails will have close to a 100% open rate. This is (likely) an important factor that Google uses to judge whether email is transactional, or more generally whether it is desired by recipients, alongside other factors like having a very low complaint rate.
    - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
      I rarely open 2FA emails, because usually the displayed preview is all I need.
    - MaxGabriel 3y ago
      100% open rate on transactional emails feels too high to me. Something like an e-commerce purchase might kick off multiple emails (purchase made, shipped, arrived), none of which the user opens
      - stubish 3y ago
        Kicking off a chain of emails a user cannot easily opt out of could well be the sort of emails users want to lose. There probably should be a one-click 'stop emailing me' button, for this and future purchases. Which would be a support burden, yes.
        blowski 3y ago
        We’ve received your order … we’ve taken payment for your order … your order has left our warehouse … your order has arrived in another warehouse … your order is with a delivery driver … all for a $5 cable.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Well, I wish my ISP would stop marking ads and promotions as "transactional". Just because they have a system that prohibits unsubscribing, doesn't mean they should be allowed to abuse that system.
  - 93po 3y ago
    I've had a website that sent me no fewer than 6 emails over the course of 10 days for a single transaction, 5 of which were full of ads and links to their website and products. I emailed them and asked them to stop and their response was there was no way to opt out, they were transactional for new accounts.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      My ISP constantly sends me emails about "staying safe online" and "the holiday season". At the bottom of the email, it says "THIS IS A SERVICE-RELATED EMAIL", supposedly to excuse the lack of any unsubscribe link. Unfortunately you are no longer allowed to take them to court over this, as their terms of service simply say you are no longer allowed to sue them :) just like all tech companies that know they're committing lawsuit-worthy offenses.
- wl 3y ago
  Maybe transactional emails don't need an unsubscribe link like marketing emails, but they do need a "not my account; please stop" link to avoid the spam button.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    Lack of opt-in into those will have me keep marking those as spam. Just like those US political newsletters that also don’t feel like they need to verify mails.
    - josephg 3y ago
      US political emails are even more annoying when you aren’t American. I flag all that stuff as spam without hesitation. If you do that, I hope your entire domain ends up flagged as spam.
      - tomjen3 3y ago
        I had the idea to do a 1 dollar donation and then see the campaign getting flagged for illegal campaign contributions, but that is probably illegal for me as well. (non-us based not us citizen)
  - andersa 3y ago
    Why would you be receiving transactional emails for an account that isn't yours?
    - josephg 3y ago
      Hah. I have josephg@gmail. I sometimes wake up to threads of 6+ password reset attempts over an hour from someone who doesn’t know their own email address. For a couple years I got pay stubs. And monthly cell phone invoices from India. I think that email address gets more email for other people than email for me at this point.
      - guiambros 3y ago
tsycho 3y ago
Their algorithms very likely look at (I hope so, at least) spam marking rates. I would bet that users mark promotional emails at a order of magnitude higher rate than transactional emails.
jerrygoyal 3y ago
use different subdomains for transactional and marketing emails.
dexwiz 3y ago
Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? They have reliably been sorting my promotional emails from transaction emails for almost a decade now. But off the top of my head when working on an email marketing platform: sender address, message subject and content, single message or bulk inbound at a given time, open rates, click rates, unsub rates, bounce rates. Part of sender reputation is ESPs building a profile of what kind of email you send from an address.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  > you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Nope, I don't. So many things get constantly marked as spam in my inbox, even server notifications, from the same domain, same daily emails, marked repeatedly as "not spam", and added to address book. Then there's the second problem of google support... your 2fa passwords, email-authentications, password reset links, etc. will be sent out, gmail will send them to spam, your users won't see/find the email, and there's nothing you can do... noone to call at google that would actually listen and try to do anything, no penalties if they don't do anything, only hope that your service is large enough that it gets some traction on twitter or here and some random googler sees it.
- xyst 3y ago
  You could have put Google in early ‘00s on this pedestal. But the Google today is not worthy of this. G is like any other Fortune 500 company now. The amount of products in their graveyard grows every year. Maintenance of “legacy” apps is handed off to offshore teams who have objectives to just keep it running until it’s 86’d. Google has also made plenty of mistakes with web: look at PWAs, AMP, and Chrome just to start.
- boplicity 3y ago
  > you probably should have unsubscribe links They're not requiring just unsubscribe links. They're specifically requiring "one-click" unsubscribe links that can accept a POST request for unsubscribing. This allows their software to have an unsubscribe button that doesn't require the user to leave their software. This is the RFC that has to be complied with: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 Note, that this is not easy for many people using legacy software. It's a major change. I wouldn't be surprised if this requirement gets delayed multiple times.

ahoka 3y ago

Also forcing people to click on opaque links in random emails cannot end good.

mrtesthah 3y ago

Well the answer of course is for google to clone the unique features of your service and classify your site and its outgoing emails as spam.

trawls14 3y ago

Our (Postmark's) take is that while these changes are explicitly for marketing/bulk email senders, they are coming for transactional emails as well sooner or later: https://postmarkapp.com/blog/2024-gmail-yahoo-email-requirements https://postmarkapp.com/blog/2024-gmail-yahoo-email-requirem...

orliesaurus 3y ago

You're talking about Transactional emails? You cant unsubscribe from TRANSACTIONAL emails. That's why they're transactional...not marketing. It's really important to differentiate that.

darylteo 3y ago
I "know" that. I'm asking how does Google differentiate between a transactional and a non transactional email? They also say in their guidelines > *Marketing messages and subscribed messages* must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. So how is Google determining what is a Marketing/Subscribed message? If they're not, then am I required to tack on this header to ALL emails regardless of type or risk getting binned?
- orliesaurus 3y ago
  Ahhh I see what you mean now, but it wasn't clear in your initial question. Gmail's algorithms analyzes, and has been doing over the last ~20 years, a combination of factors to classify emails as promotional or transactional! Nothing in the code itself of your email will indicate that, other than the presence of an unsub link + the rest of the footer (which is the obvious sign that's a marketing email)
- jcrites 3y ago
  If you’re sending transactional emails like password resets or MFA, then the emails will have close to a 100% open rate. This is (likely) an important factor that Google uses to judge whether email is transactional, or more generally whether it is desired by recipients, alongside other factors like having a very low complaint rate.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    I rarely open 2FA emails, because usually the displayed preview is all I need.
  - MaxGabriel 3y ago
    100% open rate on transactional emails feels too high to me. Something like an e-commerce purchase might kick off multiple emails (purchase made, shipped, arrived), none of which the user opens
    - stubish 3y ago
      Kicking off a chain of emails a user cannot easily opt out of could well be the sort of emails users want to lose. There probably should be a one-click 'stop emailing me' button, for this and future purchases. Which would be a support burden, yes.
      - blowski 3y ago
        We’ve received your order … we’ve taken payment for your order … your order has left our warehouse … your order has arrived in another warehouse … your order is with a delivery driver … all for a $5 cable.
LoganDark 3y ago
Well, I wish my ISP would stop marking ads and promotions as "transactional". Just because they have a system that prohibits unsubscribing, doesn't mean they should be allowed to abuse that system.
- 93po 3y ago
  I've had a website that sent me no fewer than 6 emails over the course of 10 days for a single transaction, 5 of which were full of ads and links to their website and products. I emailed them and asked them to stop and their response was there was no way to opt out, they were transactional for new accounts.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    My ISP constantly sends me emails about "staying safe online" and "the holiday season". At the bottom of the email, it says "THIS IS A SERVICE-RELATED EMAIL", supposedly to excuse the lack of any unsubscribe link. Unfortunately you are no longer allowed to take them to court over this, as their terms of service simply say you are no longer allowed to sue them :) just like all tech companies that know they're committing lawsuit-worthy offenses.
wl 3y ago
Maybe transactional emails don't need an unsubscribe link like marketing emails, but they do need a "not my account; please stop" link to avoid the spam button.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Lack of opt-in into those will have me keep marking those as spam. Just like those US political newsletters that also don’t feel like they need to verify mails.
  - josephg 3y ago
    US political emails are even more annoying when you aren’t American. I flag all that stuff as spam without hesitation. If you do that, I hope your entire domain ends up flagged as spam.
    - tomjen3 3y ago
      I had the idea to do a 1 dollar donation and then see the campaign getting flagged for illegal campaign contributions, but that is probably illegal for me as well. (non-us based not us citizen)
- andersa 3y ago
  Why would you be receiving transactional emails for an account that isn't yours?
  - josephg 3y ago
    Hah. I have josephg@gmail. I sometimes wake up to threads of 6+ password reset attempts over an hour from someone who doesn’t know their own email address. For a couple years I got pay stubs. And monthly cell phone invoices from India. I think that email address gets more email for other people than email for me at this point.
    - guiambros 3y ago

tsycho 3y ago

Their algorithms very likely look at (I hope so, at least) spam marking rates. I would bet that users mark promotional emails at a order of magnitude higher rate than transactional emails.

jerrygoyal 3y ago

use different subdomains for transactional and marketing emails.

dexwiz 3y ago

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? They have reliably been sorting my promotional emails from transaction emails for almost a decade now. But off the top of my head when working on an email marketing platform: sender address, message subject and content, single message or bulk inbound at a given time, open rates, click rates, unsub rates, bounce rates. Part of sender reputation is ESPs building a profile of what kind of email you send from an address.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Nope, I don't. So many things get constantly marked as spam in my inbox, even server notifications, from the same domain, same daily emails, marked repeatedly as "not spam", and added to address book. Then there's the second problem of google support... your 2fa passwords, email-authentications, password reset links, etc. will be sent out, gmail will send them to spam, your users won't see/find the email, and there's nothing you can do... noone to call at google that would actually listen and try to do anything, no penalties if they don't do anything, only hope that your service is large enough that it gets some traction on twitter or here and some random googler sees it.
xyst 3y ago
You could have put Google in early ‘00s on this pedestal. But the Google today is not worthy of this. G is like any other Fortune 500 company now. The amount of products in their graveyard grows every year. Maintenance of “legacy” apps is handed off to offshore teams who have objectives to just keep it running until it’s 86’d. Google has also made plenty of mistakes with web: look at PWAs, AMP, and Chrome just to start.
boplicity 3y ago
> you probably should have unsubscribe links They're not requiring just unsubscribe links. They're specifically requiring "one-click" unsubscribe links that can accept a POST request for unsubscribing. This allows their software to have an unsubscribe button that doesn't require the user to leave their software. This is the RFC that has to be complied with: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 Note, that this is not easy for many people using legacy software. It's a major change. I wouldn't be surprised if this requirement gets delayed multiple times.