The guidelines on this page can help email senders successfully send and deliver email subscription messages to personal Gmail accounts in your mailing lists. These guidelines help:
- Ensure your messages are delivered as expected
- Prevent your messages from being marked as spam by recipients
- Prevent Gmail users from blocking you
What is an email subscription message?
A subscription message is any email message sent to a mailing list that recipients can unsubscribe from. Common examples of this message type are promotional or marketing messages, but all marketing list, newsletter, and some types of notification messages are also considered subscription messages.
Messages sent for legal or other reasons, such as an explicit action or request by the user, aren’t subscription messages. Some examples of message types that we don’t consider subscription messages are password resets, purchase receipts, and one-time passwords (OTPs). These messages are often referred to as transactional messages.
Email subscription guidelines
- Correctly implement one-click unsubscribe for all subscription messages, in a way that no additional user action is needed to unsubscribe. Learn more about one-click unsubscribe requirements
- Process and honor unsubscribe requests within 48 hours.
- Before sending subscription messages to recipients, make sure recipients confirm their email address after entering it on your website or app. This is referred to as double consent.
- Send subscription messages and non-subscription messages from different email addresses. Examples of subscription messages include marketing messages and newsletters. Examples of non-subscription messages include password resets and receipts.
- Identify each subscription list by including a human-readable identifier in each message List-id: header, or use a unique From: address to send messages for different subscriptions. That is, each mailing list used to send subscription messages should have its own, unique From: address.
