Gmail and Yahoo Email Updates in HubSpot

Well, hi everyone. I'm super excited to be here. As Kyle mentioned, we are here today to talk about Google and Yahoo Email authentication and I'm just going to kick us off with some quick intros. So my name is Jackie Brenna. I am one of the product managers in the messaging platform group and I work with two teams, email services and email sending infrastructure. And. And you can essentially think of my scope as everything that happens to your email after you hit send. So we end all. We own all of those services. We own the pipeline that your email goes through and I also own the network of IPs that manage your deliverability. So that is my main space and I will kick it over to Deanna.

Hey folks. I am unreasonably excited to have another Deanna on the call with me. That very rarely happens in my lifetime. My name is Deanna. I sit on the product marketing team. I'm previously of Product strategy and Services. So I see a lot of familiar names in the chat. I currently oversee Marketing Hub and HubSpot's analyst relations footprint, how we talk about product and sales onboarding and how we demo the product. Fun fact, Jackie and I are, we saw a lot of Texas in the chat. Jackie and I are both Texans. I'm currently in Houston. Jackie is in Dallas.

Yes, I was thinking the same thing, Deanna. So amazing. Well, I'm going to go ahead and just dive right in today. We're going to cover the changes for Google and Yahoo. I think probably most people on this call are at least somewhat familiar. But just in case not, I'm going to do a quick overview of what's happening and what's changing. Then I will really spend the bulk of my time talking about how to manage those changes in HubSpot. And I'll be doing that with a live demo. So bear with me. Then we'll kick it off into Q and A and live discussion. So with that, let's just dive right in. As many of you know, last October, Google and Yahoo announced that starting this February, they would begin enforcing new email sender requirements for bulk senders. The requirements that they've outlined have actually been standard best practices for a long time in the email deliverability world. But with this announcement, Google and Yahoo are really formalizing the need for compliance and they're being very transparent that they will start holding senders accountable to these best practices moving forward. So what do we mean by accountable? Well, Google and Yahoo have very clearly stated that any senders who do not meet these requirements will be blocked or their Emails will be directed to spam. Obviously this is not ideal, so let's talk about what the requirements are and how we can avoid falling into those traps. So we can divide this into three buckets and this is how both Google and Yahoo announced this as well. We have email authentication, Easy Unsubscribe and Send Wanted Email. For email authentication, all bulk senders are now required to have dkim, SPF and DMARC on their email sending domains. And as I said earlier, this has been a best practice for a long time. But moving forward, Google and Yahoo will be blocking any emails that do not meet all three of these requirements. In fact, they have said they're going to be coming out with a brand new bounce message for this exact issue. So the bulk of my product updates later are actually going to be overviewing specifically how customers can manage their email authentic authentication directly in HubSpot. So I'm going to go ahead and move forward into Easy Unsubscribe and Send Wanted email because we're going to really deep dive on this one here in a minute directly in the product. So for Easy Unsubscribe, it's pretty simple. Google and Yahoo are now mandating that all promotional emails have a true one click unsubscribe option. And to be compliant with this requirement, your email headers must follow the standards that are outlined in the RFC 8058. So that gets super technical. But the long and short of it is that there were requirements that we had to change in our email headers. That is 100% owned and managed by us and we have made those changes and they've been live since February 1st. So moving forward, as of February 1st, all promotional and marketing emails that are sent out of HubSpot automatically have the appropriate email headers required to be compliant with this new One click Unsubscribe requirement. For that reason, I obviously have no product demos to do here because everything is just happening on the backend and it's automated. So. But if you have any questions about this, happy to dig into it more in the Q and A and then finally send Wanted email. So this one is really all about managing your spam rates. And before I get into this requirement, I do just want to clarify for the group that by spam rate I mean what percentage of your emails that make it to inbox are being marked as spam?

What percentage?

Not what percentage of your emails are being directed to your spam folder? So this new requirement essentially states that senders need to be maintaining a spam rate below 0.3% and if they are consistently averaging above 0.3%, then their emails will be directed directly to the spam folder instead of going to inbox. Now what is consistently averaging? We have gotten very vague definitions of this from Google and Yahoo, so I can't give you specific details like, you know, x number of emails over this amount of time. But this is something that we all need to be monitoring and managing on our own. So to that end I, I don't have anything new in the HubSpot product to help you manage this, but I do want to call it a few things about managing your spam rates. So first, of course you can continue to use the email analyze tab. You can manage your spam reports here and you should be aiming in the HubSpot product. With the way we calculate spam rate, you should be aiming for something below 0.003%. Hopefully most of your customers are familiar with this front end and somewhat comfortable using it. Now, the really important thing to call out here is that our spam rates in the HubSpot app do not factor in Google based spam complaints. Now I know that that's probably a little surprising to some of you and I'm happy to dig into why that's the case. There are some technical limitations and that's why we can't do this. But the long and short of it is that we can't do it right now. And for that reason it's extremely important that you encourage your customers or that you as a customer manage your own spam rates via Google Postmaster tools. So this is Google's tool where they are surfacing spam complaints that are reported in their tools and in their tool. You should be aiming for a spam rate that is below 0.3%, which is what they've documented in all of their announcements. And this is where you can see if you are consistently exceeding that threshold. You know that you might be at risk for being sent directly to the spam folder. So with that, I want to dive into what's new in the HubSpot app because that's what I'm really excited to talk to you all about today. So for email authentication, our number one priority has been enabling customers to set up and manage DKIM, SPF and DMARC directly in HubSpot. And in order to do that, we have a new in app authentication wizard that will help you get these set up. Now, of course, just setting up a domain is not good enough, right? That is the first step, but the Real important thing here is that you're actually sending emails with that domain. So in addition to helping customers get their domain set up, we have released new in app warnings and notifications in the marketing email tool that will allow customers to easily see what campaigns are not using authenticated email addresses and so they can audit them, either set up that domain or update the campaign to send from a different from address. So these are the two things I'll be focusing on in my live demo. But before I jump into that, I do just want to call out that a lot of time and care has gone into creating new knowledge based articles for our customers and our partners. And I just, I have to point this out to everybody because there's tons of good information available publicly Now. I will also say that I have a weekly meeting with our tech writers where I review any and all feedback from these articles. So if you're reading this article and you think this is not helpful, please, please, please submit that form and give us that feedback. I promise you it does not go into a black hole of feedback. I literally look at this weekly and I want to help you help your customers. So, so yeah, please take a look at all of these new articles and let us know if you have any thoughts. So with that I'm going to go ahead and dive into my live demo. So we're going to start with actually setting up an email sending domain in HubSpot. And to do this you're going to navigate to settings, scroll down to websites and select domains and URLs. From here we'll press Connect to domain email sending Connect. Let me get the domain I'm going to use for this demo while I copy this over and make my way through this flow. I'll just point out that if you've ever set up an email sending domain, then you know that what I'm showing you so far is not net new. This has been a part of the product for a long time. So what's really new here is that previously we only assisted customers in getting DKIM set up. So that's what we were enabling through the HubSpot product. And now you'll see that we also have sections for SPF and dmarc. You'll immediately notice that my DMARC policy says already exist. And the reason that that's the case is because we are actually pinging the DNS immediately after you tell us what domain you want to set up and and we are figuring out what records you already have configured for that domain. We obviously don't want to put you in a situation where HubSpot has recommended that you add a record to your DNS that conflicts with an existing record. So it was really important to us when we were developing this that we could automatically condense any of the sections that are already configured because we know that a lot of our customers are not only sending from HubSpot, they're sending from other platforms as well. And it's possible that they come in with some of these things already configured. And so we wanted to be able to solve for that use case. So let's just say I'm already a sender, I'm sending out of another platform. That's why I already have dmarc. So I come in here, I have that validation. Amazing. But what I'm missing is dkim and spf. So I'm going to go ahead and just set those up live during this demo. So I use GoDaddy. I'm going to press add a new record and let's just say that I've never done this before or that it's been a while and I'm going to come back and I'm going to see the record types are cname, cname and text record. So I need to add three records. Come back here. I need one cname record, another cname record and a text record.

Hey Jackie, we had a question in the chat. Can you really quickly walk back through how to get to this page in HubSpot? Were you?

No problem. So I'm just going to go back as if I just logged in. I know some of these settings are kind of hidden, so. And luckily there are some places throughout the product where we link you out to that settings page and I'll show you more of that later. But what we'll do is we'll come to settings, we'll scroll down to websites, and then we'll enter domains and URLs. So normally this would be collapse. So you're going to have to open that section, press domains and URLs and then you'll be able to get to this page. From here is where you can connect your domain, select email sending, and go through the flow that I was showing you. Does that answer the question? Deanna? Perfect.

Sure does.

Awesome. I'm just going to get right back into the flow. Amazing. We can see that nothing's changed. I've added these two cname records in my text record, but I haven't actually copied anything over. Let's go back and get that going. I'm just going to start with this very first cname record, I'm going to copy this host. Even though the name doesn't directly correlate, there are so many domain providers, we can't make our syntax directly match exactly what their syntax is going to look like. But we do find that there are typically these two different fields. So I'm just going to go ahead and copy that in the first field, copy that in the second field, and I'm just going to do that for all three of these records. Make sure I got that one. Cool. And I'm going to press Save Records. All right, so I'm going to let that do its thing and come back to Settings. So we see that we have this verify button. And before I press that Verify button, I do want to call out that we have noted at the very top of this page that domain connection can take up to 60 minutes, maybe longer. The reason for that is you are typically setting up your DNS records not directly in the DNS, but through your domain provider. In my case, again, it's GoDaddy. GoDaddy has to take all of that information. They have to do whatever they're doing internally with it, and then they have to send it over to the actual DNS from there. Once it's actually available on the DNS, we can show that on our front end, but until that happens, we're not going to be able to display that we see those changes because the changes aren't actually in the DNS yet. It's really important that customers hopefully see this. And I will say we're actively working on some UI improvements to make that warning a little bit more visible. But all of that caveat said I'm going to go ahead and press Verify and we'll just see what's connected and what hasn't. Great. Okay, so nothing's connected. And I can sit here and press Check again until things have connected, which you can see that they're starting to. I can also just press Finish later and be like, okay, it said it was going to take an hour. I'm going to move on and come back and check it later. So I'm going to let that do its thing and I'm going to scroll down here and talk a little bit about some of the updates in this part of the tool. And just to clarify, I'm in that same settings, domains and URLs page. All I'm doing now is scrolling down. So a few things that are new here. We're going to start with the different authentication statuses so previously, either you were connected or not connected. And we've made some small updates here. So let's start with the easy one which is authenticated. If you see this green dot and you see authenticated, then that means you have dkim, SPF and DMARC all set up for that domain, you're good to go, you're ready to send, there's nothing more you need to do. If you see partially authenticated, then what that means is you have dkim, but you are either missing spf, DMARC or both. Now, the reason for this status is because we don't feel as HubSpot, that we can mandate or require that a customer sets up DMARC or spf. And here's why. For dmarc, this is very much a business decision. With your DMARC policy, what you're really doing is you're telling the receiving server, here's what I want you to do. If someone sends you an email out of this domain and it doesn't authenticate properly, and there's tons of customizations you can do to your DMARC policy, the one that we recommend in HubSpot, I won't say recommend, the one that we enable you to copy and paste via HubSpot is a neutral policy, which essentially means do nothing, do whatever you would have done had I not had the DMARC policy. But the ultimate thing about DMARC is that this really is a business decision. It's not really for us to mandate you to do this. So while we do strongly recommend it, and in fact in the flow we were just looking at, it says strongly recommended next to dmarc, we are not requiring DMARC to be set up for you to send with that domain out of HubSpot for SPF. The reason that it's only strongly recommended and not required is because according to the rfc, SPF is actually as a best practice required on your envelope return path domain, not your from address domain. Now, we know that there are some providers who check for SPF on the from address domain. Sometimes we call that the friendly from. And we also see that these requirements are just getting stricter and stricter over time. So instead of doing this huge, massive communication, and then in a year coming back and saying, wait, now you have to also have SPF here, we decided to just be fully transparent, get everything out there right now, and encourage customers to start setting up SPF on their friendly from domain as soon as possible. So all of that to say DMARC and SPF are only considered strongly recommended in HubSpot, which is why you can be partially authenticated with DKIM only. Kind of the reverse of that not authenticated really means that you don't have dkim because dkim is required. So if you don't have dkim set up, you cannot send out of that domain with HubSpot. And we'll get into that a little bit more later. But this kind of is a good time to jump into this next column, which is also a new feature here, which is what we show you is not connected. So previously, if you came in here and you saw that you weren't connected, it might not be clear to you what's broken, what am I missing? But now we're trying to really clearly articulate that to the customer in the front end. So for this one, I'm not authenticated and I'm missing everything. Dkim, SPF, and dmarc, everything's missing. For this one, I'm not authenticated. I don't have dkim or spf, but I do have dmarc.

Right?

So. So those are the three different authentication statuses, and that's how you can utilize this part of the tool to help you understand what is happening. And then another new feature on this page is this Continue Domain Setup. So previously, if you came in here and you wanted to modify your domain setup, you would have to fully disconnect and reconnect. But now you can press Continue Domain Setup. Jump in here and you'll see that we collapse those sections that are already connected and we prompt you to set up whatever's missing. I'm going to go ahead and refresh this page and just see if that domain has connected. It looks like my SPF has connected, but my dkim hasn't yet. It's doing its thing. I'm going to go ahead and move on with my demo. The next thing I want to talk about is the new warnings and notifications in the marketing email tool. We've set up our domain. We think we're good to go. We're ready to start sending. I'm going to go here and start creating an email. All right, so we immediately see this large red bar at the top which says some automated emails are at risk at not being delivered. Take action to authenticate your email sending domains. From here, I can press see affected emails, and it's going to jump into this front end. That allows me to audit where I have these issues. So there's a few different tabs here and let's dive into what these Each are telling you. So this first tab is telling you any domains that are only partially authenticated. Again, partially authenticated means you have dkim, but you're missing SPF or DMARC or both. We're going to allow you to send with that domain, but we do want to just warn you that if you send with these domains, you are susceptible to a bounce because you are not fully authenticated. From here, you can either open the email and update it so that you're using a from address that has a fully authenticated domain, or you can press Continue domain setup and that's going to pop you right into the configuration page. Bam. So I can see for that one I was missing dmarc. Great. I'm going to go ahead and configure that. On the second tab we are showing you domains that are not authenticated. Not authenticated again means that you are missing dkim and if you're missing dkim, then we do not actually allow you to send from that domain at HubSpot. Now, that does not mean that your email is going to drop or not send. What we're going to do is we're going to modify your from address so that you use a HubSpot managed domain that is fully authenticated. And I'm actually just going to use our new article to show how this works.

Oh yes, sorry. Someone asked if you could show how you got to that screen that you were on before this one.

Yeah, so go back to marketing emails so you're going to see that screen if you have issues. So if you don't have issues, you're not going to see this warning and then there's nothing for you to audit at that time. Amazing. And I'll also call out that I'm not going to demo this live, but because this portal has a lot going on in it. But when you're creating a marketing email, we also have like if you're just sending a batch email and it's not automated or scheduled for later, we also have warnings in the front and there to tell you you're about to send this email with either a partially authenticated unauthenticated and it has all the same warnings if you're sending a live batch email. So let me, let me think, where was I? Okay. Yes, yes, yes. So not modified. So again, we're looking at the second tab which is telling you something that's not authenticated. I just press this link so I can see what does this mean? And here's what's going to happen in this situation, if you do attempt to send an email from HubSpot that is not authenticated, that is does not at least have dkim, then we are not going to block or drop your email, but we are going to modify your from address. So let's use this as an example. You attempt to send from user@your company.com to and this domain in this situation does not have DKIM. So we're going to see that when you're sending your email and instead of just letting you send and letting the email bounce, what we're going to do is we're going to take your original from address and we're going to modify it so that the symbol becomes an equals and now your entire email address that you were attempting to send from becomes the beginning of your email address. And then what we're doing is we are appending a HubSpot managed email address domain, not email address that is fully authenticated. So your email is still going to send. You're not going to see an authentication bounce in this situation. Your customer can still see your brand information here, but ultimately you are sending over the HubSpot domain. Now, obviously this is not ideal, right? The preference is that you come in here and you either send from a fully authenticated domain that is connected to your brand or, or that you connect the domain you're attempting to send from. But as just a final stopgap, if someone just doesn't understand what they're looking at and doesn't understand the ramifications, we do have this as a fallback. And then finally this last tab, it is showing you any unauthenticated emails that are using personalization tokens. So in this situation, you're not selecting a specific from address, but you're using a personalization token to determine what from address will be used. And, and we're providing the same information that we'll be modifying in that situation so that we use this variable domain. So, so that's where we're surfacing all of these issues in the marketing email tool. And really that is, that is what I had for y' all today. I will just show that we have these resources available, all these new KBAs. Of course we want you to go sign up with Google Postmaster Tools and, and continue utilizing the HubSpot Community Board for discussions. But we are actively reviewing that blog post and any comments or questions that, and I'm happy to chat with anyone now. So I think we hopefully have lots of time for QA so I can stop sharing my screen and open the floor awesome.

Perfect.

Yes. We've got tons of questions. I'm going to let Deanna take it.

Thanks, other Deanna, I appreciate you. Okay, where do we want to start? Okay, so Selma asks, could we provide some guidance on how to proceed when we encounter this domain has an existing SPF record?

Yes. Okay, so let me pull up, I'm going to share my screen again.

Please do.

So this was one of the biggest points of feedback that we've received about this and I will also call out that this is something that we're working on, an improvement on the front end for. Okay. And it's in one of these articles, so let me just see which one. Okay, amazing. So we, we know that this was maybe a miss on our side when we first released this. And we, we did though I will call out that when you're in your settings and you are setting up. Okay, wait, this is set up now? Nevermind, let me use a different one. And you're setting up spf. Not only are we pinging the DNS to see like, do you have a DMARC record or not? Do you have a DKIM record or not? But for SPF specifically, we're actually modifying what these fields look like depending on whether you have an SPF record for another sender or. So if you don't have an SPF record at all, you're setting up one from scratch and that's actually more straightforward for most folks. But if you do have an SPF record, then all you need to do is copy over HubSpot's include statement. So you can see this include and then it has your domain here, so it has our HubSpot domain. So the big difference here is with this V SPF one, if you don't have an SPF record at all, then that's going to be included in your copy statement. But if you do already have an SPF record, that won't be there. You'll only see the include statement. And then where did this go? We just updated our Knowledge Base article to outline exactly how this is going to work. So you can have up to 10 include statements on any domain's SPF record. And if you already have one, so let's just say that you came in, you already had b equals SPF1. With this include for another provider, all you need to do is put a space, add our include statement, which should be the only thing in the copy field. So you shouldn't accidentally be able to copy v equals SPF1 and put that again, and then we have this dash all at the end and that's the formal syntax for your SPF record. And we've tried to outline this in a much more direct way in this knowledge base article now. So this was all missing two weeks ago. So if you're like, I just looked at this and it wasn't there. You're not crazy. It wasn't hearing your feedback and updated the knowledge base. So I hope that.

Perfect. Thanks, Jackie. I have a couple of quick confirmation ones. Does this affect only marketing emails or does this also apply to one on one sales emails?

So these new requirements are not required for one to one sales emails. This is specifically for bulk marketing and promotional emails. For example, the one click unsubscribe headers, those are not required on one to one emails. So we do recommend email authentication for any emails that you're sending though.

And then a quick double check on that spam rate threshold. 0.3% or 0.003%.

Yes. So that's. That can be very confusing. So in the HubSpot product, with the way that we calculate spam rates, which is taking in feedback from all different ISPs, we have a threshold of 0.003%. But Google's threshold, when you're managing and monitoring your spam rates in the Google Postmaster tools, that is 0.3%. That is the threshold that you need to be on the lookout for.

Amazing. Similar to what we were just talking about. We might have talked about this in your demo. But do our DMARCs require policies? Are we still okay to set P equals none like in the past?

Yeah. So Google's official announcement, Google and Yahoo's official announcement said that a neutral policy is acceptable right now. So for now you can get by with a neutral policy. That said, I'm no future teller, I don't work for Google and Yahoo. I want to be very clear about that. But I would recommend that you work with your customers, work with your businesses to figure out what a true DMARC policy looks like to you. Because I would anticipate this becoming more strict in the future. And I will just point out that. Let me share my screen again. Okay. This is a little different for HubSpot and our knowledge based system. We tend to stay really product focused. But we did recently create this overview of email authentication. And if you do have questions about like, you know, DMARC can be really overwhelming. Email authentication in general is really overwhelming. So we tried to really break down what these concepts mean, how you can use them, how they apply to your business. And we've really done this with the DMARC policy. So we've broken it down, sent by each different point in the syntax of a DMARC policy to tell you what? What does it mean if you put none? What does it mean if you put quarantine? What does it mean if you put reject? And how are each of these different components read by the receiving end? So cool.

Amazing. Can we switch gears real quick to one click unsubscribe? We got a good question from Jeanette. She wants to know if she's going to be blocked if she sends everyone to the subscription center to unsubscribe from all.

So you can still have your regular unsubscribe options in the footer of your email like you always have. There's absolutely no issue with having those there. And frankly, even knowing everything I know about this, I personally almost always use those because I rarely want to unsubscribe from an entire set of emails from a service. So we absolutely encourage that you keep all of those footers, you maintain all of your normal subscription pages. In addition to that, your headers will by default be informing the receiving end that you opt in to one click unsubscribe and they will present that however they present it. So your customers will just now have two different places they can unsubscribe in your email.

Perfect.

And if I can just add one little thing there. If you're talking to your customers about this or if you're talking to your teammates about this and people are panicking, for lack of a better word, about the one click unsubscribe option and how easy that is now for customers. I just want to remind everybody that an unsubscribe is not necessarily a bad thing. When someone unsubscribes from an email in a lot of ways, they're legitimizing who you are as a business because the alternative option is marking you as spam. So I just want to say that from Google and Yahoo's perspective, actually, an unsubscribe in a lot of ways legitimizes you as a sender. Obviously, you don't want people to unsubscribe. You want them to receive your marketing emails. And I mean, I completely get that. I just think that there is kind of a really negative connotation around this one click unsubscribe option. And I just wanted to say that I actually think Google and Yahoo in some ways are trying to protect you as the sender because the alternative if people can't find it buried in your footer is they're gonna be like, this is spam. And so I just wanted to say if that helps paints even a little bit of a better picture about this new requirement, then I wanted to do so.

I've also had some questions floating around about should we be expecting a higher unsubscribe rate? And does one click unsubscribe make people want to opt out? And the reason, the more philosophical answer is if someone was clicking unsubscribe, they were already showing intent to unsubscribe. The one click just, just doesn't block the door for them. It just makes it easier because there is nothing that is more irritating to me as a consumer than having to create a profile and log in just to unsubscribe. So this is more, let's be better to our consumers and to us as consumers, instead of a, like, we're punishing you by making this easier.

Absolutely. And if I can just plus one to that and add that sending to people who want to receive your emails and are going to interact with your emails, that is going to improve your click rates, that is going to improve your open rates, that is going to improve your deliverability to the receiving server. So I know that, that it can be a hard pill to swallow as a business when you see that unsubscribe. But, but just remember, if someone didn't want to receive your emails, right then they could be negatively impacting some of those metrics for you. So, so I, I, I just plus one to everything Deanna said.

All right, so Trish asks, can we have more than one SPF record for a domain using subdomains?

Absolutely, yes. So any domain or subdomain can have up to 10 SPF records. So that's a great question. Yes. It's not at the root domain level that you have that limit of 10. It's each individual subdomain and the root domain itself.

Lovely. Right. I'm just trying to scan if there's already an SPF record and we need to make sure we're not overriding it, but we're just appending HubSpot. That was where you went through and you copied it directly out and pasted it. Correct.

In my original demo, I was showing you adding a. Net new SPF record. Let me just share my screen real quick. I don't actually have another provider to show this with, but let's just say, well, these all have HubSpot. Man, I wish I'd set up Another one so that I could show you all this. If you already have an SPF record, then when you come in here, your host value is going to be empty and the required data field is not going to have this v SPF one. And we're going to have some additional verbiage here that says we see you already have an SPF record and we're going to link out directly to this guide, this section of this guide, not just this whole document that can be hard to follow, but we're going to link you out directly to this section of this guide that explains how to add an additional SPF record. So let me just say, for starters, you will have clear indications in the front end you already have one record for this domain. And so you should be triggered to go look at this hopefully and familiarize yourself with the process. And what you're going to do is you're going to copy what's listed in the required data. You're going to come in here and find that text record. Let me find one of my SPF text records. You're going to edit this. What you would do then is you would press space and then you would paste in just that include statement and then press save.

Perfect. What about if folks are only seeing disconnect as their only options there?

If you're only seeing disconnect as your option there? Yeah. That means that you are fully authenticated first of all, so you don't need to make any changes to your DNS records. But again, I know I've said this multiple times now, but I really mean it. You'll see this within the next few weeks. We are actually working on a front end update where you can view your DNS records even though you're already set up. That has been a major pain point for a very long time and that's something that we're actively working on right now. Right now, today. If you're fully authenticated, you can't view your DNS records in HubSpot. That is true. The only way you could view them is by going to your DNS manager like I just did with GoDaddy, finding the record and being like, that's my record. But if you're trying to gut check or you're anxious, you mess something up and you just want to make sure it's there. We are working on an improvement to the UI so that you can actually see those records even though they're already set up.

And what happens if our folks have SPF and DKIM set up but not a DMARC setup.

So according to Google and Yahoo, if you don't have a DMARC record, then you're going to be bounced with that new email authentication bounce message. So, you know, it's a little bit early for us to report back on what we're actually seeing and their most recent updates on timing, I don't believe that they'll actually be enforcing that for another month or so. But again, I'm not Googler Yahoo, so you know, I can't formally speak to any timelines that they have. But. But yeah, the official party line is you need dkim, SPF and dmarc and if you don't have all three, you will be bounced.

So I think this question might be related to verbing. So if I mess it up. Jackie, I'm sorry in advance.

I got you back.

Oh, Jacinta is asking. They're using personalization tokens for their sales reps to send auto responses for leads that they're not actioning fast enough in HubSpot. So they're seeing HubSpot adding the HS Dash domain to their emails and it doesn't look great, it looks spammy. So she's wondering if there's a way to get all of those authenticated because they use personalization tokens because the email is coming directly from a sales rep, does this affect the reply to like, what's going on in that situation?

Yeah. So the way to get those emails authenticated so that we don't go through this variable domain process would be to authenticate the domain directly in HubSpot. Now, if you're using a, like a Google a Gmail address or a Yahoo address or whatever inbox provider you maybe use, they have actually come out and said that they have set their DMARC policies to strict, which means anyone who's impersonating them, I. E. Sending with a Gmail domain but not sending over Gmail's platform, you will be flagged as not being Gmail because you don't have their DKIM set up via HubSpot. And, and you'll be, you'll be blocked. Right. So it's, it's really, I understand it's a shift in how we run our businesses possibly, but the real core is that that's no longer an option to send that way out of HubSpot, out of the marketing email tool. And so really connecting a domain and sending out of the marketing email tool with a connected email sending domain is the option that we're recommending you move forward with. So I would get all those personalization tokens. I would get all those individuals on a domain that's connected or connect the the domains they're using. That would be the best advice I can give. Cool.

This is a, I think a email marketing best practice question but I'll take a stab at it and then Jackie, you can correct me. So Nicola wants to check in and see how we perform a resubscribe when someone uses Unclick one subscribe. To my knowledge, nothing changes about the resubscription process if a contact unsubscribed using one click. Correct. So we would send a campaign. We'd have them opt in through a form. We do. We'd have them opt in through website. Just traditional resubscribe. Is that correct?

Yeah. The resubscribe subscribe process will look like whatever it's always looked like for your business. And I'll also call out with that note. Sorry there's some construction. I hope you can't hear that. I'll also call out on that note that our one click unsubscribe is only unsubscribing your customer from the subscription type that was used to send that particular email. It's not unsubscribing them from all of your subscriptions.

So Lana asks a question that I don't know what it means but you probably do do HubSpot. Does HubSpot require users to set up PTR records when they're sending an IP address?

Yes, I do know what that means and we're not facilitating you to do that in the product at all. But we have that set up for all of our sending domains. And if you have a dedicated IP then you're prompted to set that up because that's more relevant to the return path domain. And then of course with your SPF record you are essentially telling the ISP what set of IPs you can send over. That's really what your SPF record is doing. So. So the long and short of is it is that we as HubSpot are handling that on your behalf.

Perfect. I'm not even going to try and say Bimmy. So do we have any plans for Bi Mi? Because I don't know what that is either.

Yes. So I, I have a vague understanding of of Bimmy. I'll be completely transparent with the group. I was just chatting with our Deliverability team a month or so ago and this came up as we were working through this and honestly our focus was on the addressing the requirements Google and Yahoo set out and we said bimi is something we'll think about and talk about, you know, second half of this year. So no immediate plans right now.

All right. And then this looks like a nice one to start wrapping us up. Are we able to monitor and view all the records for each domain, even when they're authenticated in HubSpot?

Monitor and view all the records. All of the DNS records. So this goes back to that front end improvement that we're working on right now. So today if you're fully authenticated, there's no way for you to monitor or view, not really monitor, but to view your records directly in HubSpot. But we're working on an improvement. So you can do that because that's been feedback we've been hearing for many years. So. So be on the lookout for that one. But today that is not possible.

Cool. And it looks like that was asked a couple of times. I'm going to go on and mark those. So quick question. Generically speaking, is adding to our DMARC the same as adding to spf? So it's just adding the required data to the existing record. We're good to go. We see the green flag just to double check on that one.

Yeah. So adding your DMARC record, just like adding SPF or dkim is just copying and pasting the values that we show you in the front end over into your DNS. And once you see that green checkmark, you have a DMARC record. Now I just want to say that with. It's not a caveat for what you need to do. You will be, you will be meeting the requirements if you do that. Absolutely 100% like non starter. So that is good enough. The record we are Putting in the HubSpot front end is a neutral policy. So that kind of gets back to what we discussed earlier about how today a neutral policy is fine and long term. It would be good for you and your business to decide what a real DMARC policy looks like to you. So. So yes, the record that we have is absolutely sufficient. It's just kind of the bare minimum is maybe a good way to put it.

Perfect. All right, sorry, there are a lot of questions and we are doing a very good job at busting through them. So what if we use an SPF flattening service and HubSpot doesn't see the SPF record because of said flattening service?

Yeah, that's come up a few times. That's come up a few times.

Sad face. She says.

I'm just, We've had so many conversations about how to improve this SPF experience. And honestly, right now I'm drawing a blank on where we landed on the SPF flattening service. But I want to say. I want to. I want to not say anything because I don't want to say the wrong thing right now. Would it be possible for me to follow up and just. Is there a way to get back with the group, Deanna, so that I can follow up on that one?

Yeah, we have the LinkedIn group. We also have the HubSpot community page, and then there's also the. The Hug YouTube channel. So any of those places, if someone asks a question or you'd like to. To dive in further, we can do that.

Okay. Amazing. This is not the first time I've heard this question. I heard this question in our internal channels and our internal support channels with customer service managers and support reps and just being honest that my mind is drawing a blank and I can't remember what our official party line is there. So let me get back to y'. All.

Perfect. So I think this is kind of an interesting question from Jeanette. It's not technical, but it speaks to how HubSpot as a business is handling this. So what is the reason that a customer would have separate domains to split up all the traffic? So, like, you know, HubSpot's doing subdomains to handle this. Like, why are we doing that but not advising customers to do that?

Yeah, that's a. That's a great question. I don't know if I'd say we're not advising customers to do that as much as we absolutely see that as a business decision. So the reason that we're doing that internally is because we have a lot of different teams within HubSpot who are sending our customers email, and it's hard for us to manage our spam rates and enable those teams to send healthy email without knowing how each of them are kind of performing independently. Additionally, by breaking off into your own subdomains, you're isolating that reputation. And so for better or for worse, you won't be impacted by other people sending. Right. So. So those are kind of the core reasons we decided to do that, was to isolate the deliverability and isolate the ramifications of the performance of those emails. And then ultimately the goal then for those, let's say lesser performing email teams who don't have good click rates, don't have good open rates, have high spam rates, is to enable them to improve their sending. Right. And figure out which teams that is because today we have no line of sight to that. So those are some of our reasons for wanting to go that direction. And I think it's. It really just depends on how your business is set up and how many different disparate, disconnected teams are sending email out of the same domain.

Amazing. Deanna, do you want to take one more pass for me through Q and A? I think we answered a bulk of the big ones.

I shall do that. Awesome. I also, for everyone, I put the survey in the channel, in the chat channel and I pinned it at the top. I want to just make sure if you've got any other questions, you're welcome to put those in that and we'll share those with Jackie Indiana, and we'll make sure that the HubSpot team gets those. The same with the chat. So if your message got missed or if it was a slight variation but you still feel like you need that answered, we are going to share those over with them and then again engage with them on LinkedIn, engage with them on the community and anywhere else that you want to do that. Let me see. I am seeing any questions that I.

Feel like I have.

One more. So, last question from Karen. Yeah. Are there any concerns with an email being from an authenticated address but the reply to email is not authenticated?

No, there's no. I. I've heard no guidance about requirements around the reply to email address, so.

Perfect.

I will just take this opportunity while I'm talking again to say regarding the questions about just setting up that DMARC record, setting up that SPF record and seeing that green check mark, that is absolutely the first step. And the second and the absolute most critical step is that you're actually using that domain when you send emails. So just setting it up in HubSpot does no good if you're sending emails in different domains.

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Jackie. We appreciate your time.

No, thanks.

Yeah, no, it was great. And Deanna, you blew the questions out of the water better than I could have done, so I appreciate it.

Yeah, I was typing as fast as I could and I was like, here we go.

Thank you so much, Deanna. Yeah.

Awesome.

All right, everybody, if they want to get in touch with you, is LinkedIn email. What is your preferred method of contact?

Yeah, I mean, if, if you want to talk about some of this, I would highly recommend that you use the community forum because we posted this blog post and I'm actively reviewing those comments and questions and we'll continue doing so. And then of course, I'm on the forum, so my direct message is always available as well. So wonderful.

Same with you, Deanna.

Oh yes. Yeah, I was.

Yeah.

And if you got. Yeah, you can LinkedIn DM me. I'll send you a calendar invite if you need it. Like, happy to chat.

Yes. And LinkedIn is fine. I just don't. I'm breaking from social media right now, so I just don't check it as frequently. But you're. I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn and also it might be a while till I respond.

No worries. I put the community link in the chat so if anyone wants to get ahold of you, they can do that. And when I send out the recording via email, I will make sure to put that there as well so that everybody can get to the same location. And we did lose Kyle. Kyle ran off to go to his next session so we. We're not going to see him again. But I will post some pictures. I actually just shared one of us here at the event, so a little bit of fun that everyone can see. Awesome. Deanna, Jackie, thank you so much. I appreciate it. I know there's a lot that goes on with it and it's a lot of, you know, parts and pieces to take in and it's just a matter of following those prompts. That UI has gotten a lot better and it's a lot easier to do for even non technical folks. So appreciate it so much. And everyone have a great day. If you stay on for a minute, I might show you a little video.

Thanks.

Appreciate you. Bye guys. Bye.