It is common practice for an investment manager to hit send once on an email to reach thousands of subscribers. But this could now be perilous.
We have reported before on Gmail’s bulk-sender rules, as a response to the threat of bad bot traffic dominating the web as we know it. Mostly – and it’s bad news for hedge funds, asset and wealth managers – that service providers’ restrictions are getting much tighter.
In November 2025, senders that push 5,000 or more email a day to Gmail accounts fail its threshold, and Google will proceed to permanently reject such senders (error 550; permanent delivery failure from missing authentications or blocked senders with poor IP reputation) rather than applying a simple slap to the wrist.
Another problem now is Yahoo Mail’s nearly identical deliverability standards, requiring:
- Valid SPF, DKIM and pointer (PTR) records for every sender
- DMARC configured with passing alignment for bulk senders
- One-click unsubscribes being available on marketing mailers
- A Spam-complaint total now reduced to 0.1% as the going operating rate
This last point is especially prevalent, with Gmail reducing Spam complaint thresholds down from 0.3%. Fund managers that continue to treat 0.3% as a basemark will see a sender penalised: losing access to its Postmaster Tools until it holds below that line for seven consecutive days.
Miss that penalty window and a firm can face weeks of LP emails not landing anywhere. Slap bang in the middle of a fund distribution campaign, that could break dedicated efforts toward asset-raising.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
The routine of bulk-sending capital updates, quarterly updates and event invites by fund marketers is precisely what is caught in the firing line here. Often, too, such BAU correspondence likely comes from a corporate domain through a CRM or IR platform that was not purposely built for these providers’ new deliverability rules.
The investment industry is already under the cosh compliance-wise, and firms not paying attention to their Spam-complaint rate for Gmail and Yahoo already will likely not know which of their communications never get delivered at all.
It’s not all doom-and-gloom. IRs and marketing teams should loop in their IT teams or email service providers for help, where even firms overdue in their deliverability audits can fix things quickly:
- DMARC should be set to, at least, p=quarantine
- Verified unsubscribes must be one-click (not a mailto: hidden in an email footer)
- Transactional or operational mail should be separately sent from distinct subdomains, to not jeopardise the delivery of any capital-related notices
Email deliverability should be a near-term priority given LPs’ consistent favour toward email marketing. Failure goes further than low open rates, where IP reputation and sender trust gets affected: a wicked pit to claw back from, if funds should fall in.
Source:
Redsift, 2026 bulk email sender requirements checklist
