1-Click Unsubscribe: New GMAIL & YAHOO changes

[MLong8]

Gmail and Yahoo are rolling out new requirements Feb 1st requiring that bulk senders have a 1-click unsubscribe. 

Is HubSpot rolling this out across all customers or is this something we need to enable manually in all our emails? 

[DevonG · Accepted solution]

Although @PamCotton is incorrect in their understanding of the new "one-click unsubscribe" requirement, which is RFC 8058, HubSpot is currently compliant with it (refer to my other reply).

Regarding sequences sending from your "personal email provider", that is up to interpretation of the new Yahoogle rules (since they're individual emails and not mass messages) and the provider's implementation (the email provider would have to include the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers, along with the mechanism to capture and process those requests.) HubSpot might not be able to modify the email headers of messages sent from all of the supported external email provider.

Wildcard: Gmass appears to have found a way to send emails through gmail and include the list-unsubscribe header without using their SMTP servers?

P.S. 2: after doing more research, it looks like it's possible through google apps script in google workspace and gmail (full implementation, idea). You could roll out your own and then sync the unsubscribes to HS.

[theDMM · Accepted solution]

Long story short, HubSpot has already implemented one-click unsubscribe for all HubSpot accounts. There is no need to take action. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[ABehring]

@MLong8 I've been searching for any confirmation that this is automatically included, and I've found none.

While it's nice to hear that anecdotally someone is seeing the links automatically, we really need this to be confirmed by HubSpot to ensure compliance and that we can communicate how this is handled back to our security teams. 

@PamCotton as the replies to you have said, the Unsubscribe functionality within the email is not enough to comply with the updates to Gmail and Yahoo's new standards. Can someone from the email product team tell us if our emails are compliant?

[DevonG]

I sent a test from a portal today and found that it was 8058 compliant with this in the header (along with a mailto and https in the List-Unsubscribe)

List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click

[RHB]

@DevonG are you using this code to create a 1-click unsubscribe experience from marketing emails? I'd love to hear more about that as it seems HubSpot's features don't currently enable this

[DevonG]

This is the line in the email header that tells the email client that you support a HTTP POST request to the List Unsubscribe link provided in a previous header. This can only be added to the email by the SMTP server, which HubSpot owns and manages (for marketing emails, sequences are different subject).

This was sent from a paid portal, and I assume has been rolled out to all portals equally. No further action required on your part. Please send a test email campaign to an email address where you can view the headers, or send it to a generated email at aboutmy.email to verify your current configuration. If you see the line above in the email header, you are RFC 8058 complaint.

[MLong2]

@PamCotton 

I'm asking in regards to marketing emials sent out of HubSpot. Here is the guidance that Google provides: 

I dont see how to edit the code in the headers of my emails. And if I recieve a post request, how does the post request gets processed in hubspot so that people are actually unsubscribed from my list? 

[SMcGroggan]

For bulk email sends, it appears to already be doing that. When receiving a hubspot bulk email in a gmail inbox, I see an unsubscribe button appear when I hover over the preview text and also up next to the envelope information that is displayed in the upper left hand corner of the message when it is opened. There's a lot of confusing information out there about the 1-click unsubscribe, but what I just described are what yahoo and gmail are actually looking for.

So TLDR = HubSpot is already compliant with that part of the update and you shouldn't have to do anything else.

[PamCotton]

Hey @MLong8, Happy Friday!

HubSpot already supports the addition of an unsubscribe link to your one-to-one emails sent from the contact record, which complies with spam laws (e.g., CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL) and improves email deliverability by allowing unengaged recipients a way to opt-out.

As for the "one-click unsubscribe" for Gmail and Yahoo, the existing functionality of adding the unsubscribe link to your one-to-one emails should serve this purpose. This allows recipients to opt out of receiving such emails from you with a single click.

If you're still experiencing issues with the unsubscribe link in your emails, I recommend reaching out to our support team for further assistance.

You can find more information about adding an unsubscribe link to your one-to-one emails here.

Kindly,

Pam

[MBijakowski]

Hi,

This doesn't appear to be enough when sending emails via Google integration. New rules require 1 click unsubscribe to be present in the email header, not just a link to click in the email body.

edit for better reference

How does 1click unsubscribe in the header work when sending sequences via connected individual mailbox using gsuite.
Is this possible or are we doing something wrong?

[RCakes]

This is the correct . Hubspot does not comply with RFC 2369 and RFC 8058 outside of their own marketing email servers. 

They do not include the List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click outside of their own marketing email servers.

This means that if you are using your own domain email in Hubspot for 1 to 1 messages/transaction messages/Conversations-Inbox messages, etc, even with Hubspots Unsubscribe Link on, and other GDPR/Privacy options enabled....they are still not compliant with Google/Yahoo as the emails are missing the necessary header, as far as Google/Yahoo is concerned.

Hubspot is the Mail User Agent, aka mail client, creating and sending the message to the SMTP server. It is their job, their responsibility, to create/insert/send the necessary mail message headers to the relay. 

Your emails will be caught by spam or categorized as promotions in Google/Yahoo at random even as a low volume email sender. I've tested it with multiple tools. It's a fact.

[DevonG · Accepted solution]

Although @PamCotton is incorrect in their understanding of the new "one-click unsubscribe" requirement, which is RFC 8058, HubSpot is currently compliant with it (refer to my other reply).

Regarding sequences sending from your "personal email provider", that is up to interpretation of the new Yahoogle rules (since they're individual emails and not mass messages) and the provider's implementation (the email provider would have to include the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers, along with the mechanism to capture and process those requests.) HubSpot might not be able to modify the email headers of messages sent from all of the supported external email provider.

Wildcard: Gmass appears to have found a way to send emails through gmail and include the list-unsubscribe header without using their SMTP servers?

P.S. 2: after doing more research, it looks like it's possible through google apps script in google workspace and gmail (full implementation, idea). You could roll out your own and then sync the unsubscribes to HS.

[RCakes]

Sorry but @DevonG is patently wrong about using Hubspot for literally ANYTHING outside of marketing emails as being the responsibility of the "personal email server". 

Hubspot is the MUA If you use your own domain email and IMAP/SMTP server for transactional/One to One/Conversation/Inbox/Deal mail (this is not absurd or uncommon at all, it is not still considered the norm for your customers to talk to you through a real domain email address of your actual business and not some random Hubspot alias???)

Hubspot as the defacto MUA (mail user agent) is responsible for one click compliance to both RFC 2369 and RFC 8058 and must create/insert the headers. Your IMAP or SMTP is simply the relay. 

It should be made extremely clear that if you are reliant on any external email provider for anything, and in particular if you are using IMAP or SMTP, Hubspot is effectively the email client and your own SMTP server is not responsible for generating or managing the needed unsubscribe headers or requests for unsubscribing. Hubspot is. Period. Full stop. 

The lack of implementing the required functionality to provide the https POST method for anything but their own servers is infuriating. They already inject one header and manage subscriptions. It basically means Hubspot is now that much more useless because your email may not make it to the inbox directly over what, 30%+ of the entire world population's email users.

[RCakes]

Just as a quick follow up, @DevonG technical rationale/reasoning is partially correct but the implication that it is between the receiving mail provider and the relay is where I take an issue. It's not. It's clear as day in the RFC and we are talking about protocols that generally follow pretty strict rules for compatability. SMTP servers don't generate unscubscribe logic. They don't map Contact IDs to the unsubscribe requests. Etc. That is Hubspot's job as the MUA.

The excuse of "they might not be able to modify the headers" because of compatability is just absurd, sorry. They literally create one header with custom data already prior to relaying to the SMTP. Not implementing the POST method for List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click just seems intentional or lazy. But in any case, it's painfully frustrating and really shouldn't be a problem that anyone has to deal with for wanting to use their own domain email. 

[DevonG]

Thanks for all of the clarifications, you're correct. I just wanted to error on the side of giving HS the benefit of the doubt. It was beyond my technical understanding where exactly the header was generated and whose responsibility it was to provide that. If we make an assumption based upon volumne sent, it's possible that you could still be compliant with Yahoogle rules, but that's assuming those volumes are even respected by Yahoogle themselves, which is sounds like they're not based upon your testing (and I'm frankly not surprised). Hence why I was trying to provide a workaround outside of HS.

[RCakes]

Sorry @DevonG I didn't mean to be brash but I am just absolutely shocked there aren't more people raising holey about this gaping oversight. I genuinely can't believe so few of Hubspots customers don't actually use their own domain mail/external servers for transactional email which leads me to think people genuinely just don't know how much their emails are getting flagged as spam and may not have the tecnical know how on how to monitor such things. We are very low volume and don't even do marketing emails, but I've confirmed 50-60% of our messages not making it through to Google with multiple toolsets, including GMass's. 

This has serious negative implications on our sales pipeline and order management. I've been sending out follow up "Please check your spam" messages to everyone for a week now from an alternate gmail.com account of ours just to be safe. 

I mean, this is really concerning considering Gmail and Yahoo's email market share. The fact this is even a problem is mind blowing considering the age of the RFC's and the lead time for them to implement them. 

[theDMM]

I agree with you. We also believe we're experiencing deliverability issues for similar reasons.

We use our own domain and send marketing emails from HubSpot servers (using shared IPs), and are currently at a 0.02% spam report rate over the last 30 days, up from 0.01% in the past 90 days, according to HubSpot reports. Google Postmaster Tools reports that we have 0 spam reports in the past week or so, our domain has a high reputation, and the IP has shifted to a medium reputation, down from high (screenshot below).  I noticed the decrease in IP reputation happened right after we switched our HubSpot account from the East Coast server location to the West Coast server location just a few weeks ago.

When you say “making it through to Google,” do you mean SMTP acceptance (Google accepts the message) or inbox placement (Primary/Promotions vs Spam)?

[RCakes]

@theDMM I'm primarily concerned with Inbox placement. Our states/domains/IPs/etc and all other policy compliance is fine, but we still wind up in Spam or Promotions because of that single missing header and we have a ridiculously high number of Gmail contacts (we are SMB/B2C)

[theDMM]

Got it, it seems we might be in a similar situation. We send bulk marketing emails (confirmed compliant with RFC 8058 and 2369 after testing just now) alongside several sales representatives who send one-to-one promotional emails directly to clients. We’ve noticed that some of those one-to-one emails occasionally land in spam. However, this document from Google states the one-click unsubscribe requirement specifically applies to senders delivering 5,000 or more messages per day to personal Gmail accounts. Are you exceeding that threshold? If not, it seems this rule technically wouldn’t apply to your 1-to-1 sends, which might explain why HubSpot doesn’t include the header there. Curious to hear your thoughts.

[DevonG]

I agree, which made me doubt myself before outright accusing HS of doing something improper. Some hypotheses for why there isn't more outrage about this:

1. Most marketers using these tools are not aware of these deliverability rules and best practices, much less the technicalities laid out within RFCs and even what MUA/MTA, email headers, or SMTP are.

2. They're not technical enough to understand that this is the root cause and should be HS's fault for lack of implementation (see 1).

3. There is no real feedback loop for deliverability performance, aside from internal testing or reaching out to the recipient through another channel to check (but that would require them to do 1).

4. A very small subset of HS users actually utilitize these features.

[RCakes]

Believe me, I'd love for an actual HS Dev to step in and prove me wrong and explain how to get Google Postmaster to recognize a perfecly valid, low volume, transactional email from an otherwise compliant, zero spam reported domain without that header when I, as an HS customer using HS as my primary email client and CRM have no means of injecting one myself. 

But yeah, perfectly valid rationale as to why the pitchforks aren't out.

Hubspot caters to a lot more than digital marketing customers. I figured they long since gobbled up the SMB CRM market because there is literally nothing better nor as cost effective and most of us can't afford Saleforce pricing nor want the headache. That is the camp I am personally in.