Hi there,

We'd like to inform you about the upcoming changes to Gmail's guidelines, set to take effect on February 1, 2024. Gmail is rolling out policy changes with the primary goal of fortifying security and reducing spam within its platform. 

This will impact sending emails from your Gmail addresses. Take a look at Gmail's announcement for details.

The impact happens when

1. A Gmail address is used as the Sender email.

2. High-volume emails are sent to Gmail addresses.
   
   

 1. Gmail as Sender address

When the sender's email address in Zoho Bookings (Super Admin or Staff email or Workspace or Business email) is a Gmail address, the email will be quarantined by the recipient servers. To prevent delivery issues and potential IP reputation damage, emails from "gmail.com" as the domain will not be triggered from Zoho Bookings after February 1, 2024.      


Possible scenarios

• Super Admin/admin email addresses - A Gmail address is used during Zoho Bookings signup. The Super Admin's email will be the default sender for emails.

• Sender email addresses - The sender emails of the Staff/Workspace/Business are Gmail addresses.
   

Gmail will begin using a  DMARC quarantine enforcement policy. DMARC allows domain owners to specify policies that instruct receiving email servers on how to handle messages that fail DMARC authentication.

What should you do?

To resolve this, we encourage the use of email addresses other than Gmail, preferably non-generic email addresses.

For example, if the Super Admin or any other staff in your organization signed up using a Gmail address, then we recommend you replace them with another email address. If you don't update your gmail address before Jan 31, 2024, email notifications will be sent from notifications@zohobookings.com by default. You can later switch to an email address in a custom domain.

If your sender address is set up using a custom domain (own domain), please consider setting up DKIM and SPF authentication for your domain. This is done to ensure your emails are delivered without hassles. This would be mandated from the app going forward.

2.  High-volume emails to Gmail addresses

According to Gmail's revised policies, you must have your domain DKIM and SPF authenticated when sending more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail addresses to ensure deliverability of your emails.

Possible scenarios

Consider an EduTech company, Zylker, which manages more than 5000 educators online, all using Gmail addresses. Zylker sends email notifications and reminders from its dedicated email address (admin@zylker.com). Now, this domain, zylker.com, needs to set up SPF and DKIM authentication to ensure successful email delivery.

What should you do?

• DKIM alignment - Authenticating your domain will verify your DKIM record and help fulfill Gmail's criteria. Learn more about authenticating your domain in our help doc - SPF and DKIM authentication.
  
  Note: Kindly note that in the upcoming months, we plan to make verified DKIM records mandatory, so it's recommended that you configure them at the earliest.
  

• DMARC record - Ensure that the DMARC record for the domain is set at least to "none" if you're just getting started. (You can set to quarantine/reject based on your org's decision)
  
  For example, assuming you purchased your domain on dreamhost.com, you can visit their platform and configure the DMARC policy as "none," following the provided instructions.

We'd like to emphasize that both these changes are a result of Gmail's policy change, and Zoho Bookings has no control over these guidelines. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation in ensuring that the necessary adjustments are made to your email configurations before the specified rollout date.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us at support@zohobookings.com.