Gmail's new guidelines and their impact on Zoho Creator

Hello everyone,

We'd like to inform you about the upcoming changes to Gmail's guidelines, set to take effect on February 1, 2024, which will have implications for Zoho Creator, especially on send mail tasks.

Gmail is rolling out policy changes with the primary goal of fortifying security and reducing spam within its platform. Take a look at Gmail's announcement for more details.

The impact of the updated guidelines on Creator can be categorized as follows:

Gmail address as from address
High-volume emails to Gmail addresses

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Gmail address as from address

This pertains to when the sender's email address for emails sent from Creator is a Gmail address.

Policy change
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.

Impact

This implies that emails sent with "gmail.com" as the sender (or from) domain will be quarantined by the recipient servers.

To prevent delivery issues and potential IP reputation damage, emails with a sender domain of "gmail.com" will not be triggered from Zoho Creator after February 1.

Please be aware that this limitation is specific to when gmail.com and googlemail.com is the sender domain. If you have a custom domain, such as zylker.com, hosted on Google Workspace, then it will not be impacted by the new sender email limitation.

Plausible scenarios

Super Admin email addresses - If a Gmail address was used during Zoho Creator signup, accounts will be affected because Super Admin addresses have a higher likelihood of being the sender address.
Shared users - In cases where the application was shared with a user with a Gmail address, and the send mail task specified "login user email" as the sender.
Verified email addresses - In cases where the verified email address of users is a Gmail address.
Portal user email addresses - In cases where a portal user uses a Gmail address during signup.

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

For example, if the Super Admin has a Gmail address, then the workflows can be updated by replacing the adminuserid with another verified email address. To learn more, visit the Manage sender email addresses help doc.

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High-volume emails to Gmail addresses

This pertains to when a considerable number of emails (5,000 and above) are intended to be sent to Gmail addresses.

Policy change
The revised policy mandates that domains sending more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail addresses need to adhere to enhanced authentication requirements.

Plausible scenario
Consider an organization, Zylker, which manages a supplier management portal with 10,000 portal users, all using Gmail addresses. Zylker regularly dispatches emails to these 10,000 users from its dedicated address (admin@zylker.com). Now, this domain, zylker.com, needs to fulfill Gmail's new guidelines for the emails to be delivered.

Resolution

DKIM alignment - Authenticating your domain in Creator will verify your DKIM record and help fulfill Gmail's criteria. To learn more about authenticating domains in Zoho Creator, visit the Manage domains in your Zoho Creator account help doc.
Note: Kindly note that in the upcoming months we plan on making verified DKIM records a mandatory requirement in Creator, so it's recommended that you configure them promptly.
DMARC record - Ensure that the DMARC record for the domain is published, with at least the policy be set to "none".
For example, assuming you purchased your domain on Dreamhost.com, you must visit their platform and configure the DMARC policy as "none," following the provided instructions.

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Why is compliance with the new guidelines essential?
The stipulated requirements must be met by February 1, 2024. As per Gmail's announcement, emails failing to adhere to these criteria may face rejection or be flagged as spam by their servers.

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@zohocreator.com.

Regards,
Zoho Creator Team

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