November 2025 likely felt busier for many email marketers, but in a different way. Not just because of the Black Friday “send everything to everyone” deal, but also because of a year’s worth of deliverability changes piling up and all the folks arguing on LinkedIn every other day about what it all means.
In this article, we’ve compiled some of the most important email deliverability news around November 2025: what changed at the big inbox providers and what email veterans are doing about it.
If your email campaigns looked “fine” but sales didn’t, this roundup is for you.
Key takeaways
- Gmail moved from “warnings” to actual enforcement for bulk email senders, with stricter spam filters and bigger penalties for poor sender reputation and bad email authentication.
- The big inbox providers now impose the same rules. Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook all expect SPF, DKIM, and DMARC from high-volume senders, as well as low spam complaints (less than 0.3%), working unsubscribe links, and good list hygiene.
- Inbox changes are distorting your stats. Yahoo’s storage cuts (more full inboxes) and Apple Mail’s new categories, digests, and privacy features are reshaping inbox placement and engagement metrics, even when your email marketing strategy hasn’t changed.
November 2025: the month Gmail stopped being gentle
In November 2025, the big three consumer inboxes are basically reading from the same sheet. What used to be three different sets of rules has snapped into one: authentication, consent, and complaints across the board.
Google’s updated sender FAQ now says that starting November 2025, it is ramping up enforcement, with non-compliant bulk mail about to experience temporary rate limits and outright SMTP rejections, not only simple spam filtering.
Yahoo is asking for the same basics as Gmail. You need proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), working DNS, a one-click unsubscribe link, and spam complaints staying under about 0.3% if you’re a bulk sender. Their own sender guidelines say that staying under that line is part of being seen as a “good” sender.
Microsoft is catching up, too. With Outlook.com’s update on May 5th, 2025, any domain sending 5,000+ emails a day has to pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, or it starts getting hard errors like 550 5.7.15 / 5.7.515.
So by late 2025, if you send big volumes, Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook all want the same thing: SPF, DKIM, DMARC set up, a working unsubscribe link, and spam complaints under 0.3%. If you miss that, you’re in trouble pretty much everywhere.
Yahoo and Apple: features that skew your data
While Gmail is busy tightening rules, Apple is slowly but surely wrecking your dashboard in a different way.
Mail Privacy Protection has been around since 2021, but by 2025, it’s basically everywhere. Apple Mail now loads images on its own through a proxy, hides people’s IP addresses, and creates fake “machine opens.” That makes it look like Apple users open almost every email you send.
This simply means one thing: open rates are inflated and no longer a reliable way to measure engagement, so you have to rely more on clicks and conversions instead. Demand Gen Report says the same thing from the field: marketers built segments and automations on MPP-tainted opens and watched “engaged” audiences stop behaving like engaged people.
Then Apple added Link Tracking Protection. Starting with iOS 17 and in newer versions, Mail and Safari Private Browsing remove certain tracking tags from links, like click IDs and user IDs, while leaving many basic UTM tags. That means some of your best tracking data simply disappears between the inbox and the website.
On top of that, iOS 18 Mail now auto-sorts emails into Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, and often shows marketing emails in stacked digests instead of as a single email message. So Apple is not just hiding when and where people open, it’s completely changing how your campaigns are seen in the first place.
Put together, it’s rough: inbox providers judge you on engagement, while Apple makes that engagement harder to see and measure.
Yahoo’s storage cut
While everyone is focused on Gmail’s new rules, Yahoo is messing with your numbers in its own way.
On the Yahoo side, storage got slashed. Mailboxes went from 1TB down to 20GB, which means a lot more “mailbox full” bounces than you’re used to seeing. First, it shows up as a soft bounce, but if your ESP keeps trying and failing, those often flip into hard bounces. Too many will eventually make your domain look sloppy and untrustworthy.
For deliverability, this is a problem. Yahoo’s storage change pushes your bounce rates up, while Apple’s inbox changes push your visible engagement down. If you don’t look at results by email service provider, it just looks like “November is weird.” If you do, you’ll notice: more full-inbox bounces at Yahoo, more buried promos, and odd open/click patterns on Apple.
What are the factors affecting email deliverability
Once you zoom out from all the policy pages, the sender score logic is actually pretty simple, and it has very little to do with your pretty open-rate chart.
At the top of the list: spam complaints. Gmail and Yahoo both say it outright: if users mark more than about 0.3% of their emails as spam, you’re in trouble. That number isn’t a “goal,” but an actual limit. If you stay above it for too long, you’ll see slower delivery, more emails going to the junk folder, and eventually full-on email rejection.
Next is authentication health. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies not only have to exist, but they have to pass all the time. If they fail too often, your domain and IP reputation will suffer, especially if you also have bounces or complaints.
Last but not least are list quality and engagement. Because Apple is inflating open rates, major mailbox providers are leaning harder on things that are harder to fake: clicks, replies, session time on site, email deletion, out-of-spam rescues, or moving into a folder they made themselves.
Put it together, and the new rules are clear: low complaints, properly set up email authentication protocols, good reputation, and an audience that does something with your email.
Where bulk senders are getting punished in late 2025
We know it hurts, but it’s true: a lot of legit email programs are getting treated like spammers specifically because of their lazy habits.
Problem #1: stale lists.
The same pattern comes up over and over: brands keep contacts from years ago, blast them with seasonal promos, and end up feeding recycled spam traps and outdated or invalid addresses. That can ruin a domain’s reputation and send bounce rates up even more when send volume jumps during big sales.
There’s also the “more volume = more revenue” illusion. So many teams keep emailing people who haven’t clicked in months, just to boost send numbers. With Gmail and Yahoo tracking both complaints and engagement, those sends perform terribly and make inbox placement rate worse for the rest of your list, too.
Problem #2: bad acquisition.
Another big problem is how people end up on your list. When you buy lists, use co-registration, leave checkboxes pre-ticked, or run “win a prize” giveaways, you collect a lot of email addresses from people who never really wanted your emails. They might not complain right away, but they also don’t engage.
Put that together with stale lists, and you get the same result: a huge list that looks good in a presentation, but looks low quality to Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. But what’s the point of a giant list if it brings almost no results and your revenue graph is on a downward slope?
How InboxAlly (and other tools) help you stay on top
With Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook all enforcing harder, “just watch the ESP dashboard” isn’t enough anymore. You need something to watch the works for you.
The new Postmaster doesn’t give you the old “high/medium/low” reputation scores or neat complaint charts anymore, but it’s not useless. It still shows deliverability issues, spikes in errors, and authentication problems at the domain level, so you can see where things are going wrong instead of guessing from one blended open-rate line.
InboxAlly is the next thing in the stack. It goes straight to the inbox itself: seed accounts open, scroll, click, reply, pull messages out of spam, and mark them as important. All of that teaches all major inbox providers that your emails are wanted and helps steady a shaky domain or IP reputation. This isn’t“feel-good” data because those actions line up with the exact engagement signals inbox providers already use to judge you.
Around that, tools like Red Sift’s DMARC checkers and OnDMARC help you keep SPF, DKIM, and DMARC enforced, so the technical side isn’t undoing all the reputation improvements you’re trying to get.
Now imagine a high-volume retailer in November. Gmail performance starts to go sideways, Microsoft’s May 5 rules throw fresh 5.7.15 errors, and Black Friday is around the corner. They tighten DMARC with a specialist tool, track domain/IP health in a deliverability dashboard, and use InboxAlly for targeted warmup and engagement to rebuild trust at Gmail while ramping volume. This changes the story from “we’re getting blocked,” to “we caught this early and stabilised things before the real money campaigns went out.”
Is your email setup ready for the winter?
Email deliverability in late 2025 is what it’s always been: a filter for who gets a place in the user’s endlessly growing inbox. Gmail’s enforcement, Yahoo’s storage cuts, Apple’s inbox changes, and Microsoft’s rules all point in the same direction: knit-tight setup, clear consent, and lots of engagement… or you’re out!
The upside is that this also clears the field. If you fix your data, tighten your authentication, stop emailing dead contacts, and treat deliverability as an ongoing job, you end up with a smaller list that earns you more.
Want fewer scary dips in your deliverability graphs? Add InboxAlly to your email stack and start sending the engagement signals that turn strict filters into something you can work with.