Limitations of Free Email Addresses

Your From email address is the address you use to send email to your subscribed contacts, and helps identify you as the sender. If you use a free Email hosting service like Yahoo or Gmail for your From email address, there are some limitations you should be aware of.

In this article, you'll learn about limitations of free email addresses, DMARC, and solutions to get your marketing emails to your subscribed contacts with Mailchimp.

Beginning February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will require a custom authentication and a published Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) record for anyone sending more than 5,000 emails to Gmail or Yahoo addresses in a 24-hour period. To prevent your emails from bouncing, we strongly recommend authenticating your email domain and configuring DMARC.

Also, if you use a free email service like Gmail or Yahoo for your From email address, we strongly recommend you switch to an email address from a private domain, like the one you use for work or for your website.

For more information about custom authentication and DMARC, check out About Email Domain Authentication.

What are the issues with free email?

The primary limitation of an email address from a free service provider is that you don’t own the domain. This keeps you from having control over that domain's delivery policies.

Here’s what this means for you.

• Free email addresses can’t be added to your verified email domains in Mailchimp.
• Free email address services have policies in place that are meant to prevent email scams but can cause delivery issues for legitimate marketers.
• Free email addresses are not compatible with Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). BIMI adds extra verification and allows you to prominently display your logo in your recipients’ inboxes.

About free email and DMARC

To better understand the problem with free email domains and delivery, it helps to know about DMARC, or Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.

DMARC is a validation system for incoming email. It checks that the domain of the From email address matches the domain the message is actually being sent through. If the domains don’t match, the email fails the DMARC check.

DMARC policies also tell receiving servers how to handle email that has failed the DMARC check. Free email domains often have policies that tell these receiving servers to reject mail that fails DMARC.

The intention of these strict policies is to prevent email scams, but it can also affect the delivery of legitimate marketing content sent through bulk email services like Mailchimp.

What are the solutions?

We encourage you to consider purchasing a domain or using a domain you already own to avoid issues with DMARC policies. But if you want to continue to use a free domain for email marketing in Mailchimp, we have a built-in way to help improve your delivery rates.

Purchase a domain outside of Mailchimp

Purchase a domain to use for your business and marketing email. You can use your purchased domain with your emails, landing pages, and website in Mailchimp. This helps make your entire online presence more recognizable to your audience and may improve delivery of your email campaigns.

How Mailchimp helps your delivery rates

If you use a free domain that could have delivery issues, we’ll automatically make a small change to your email address each time you send an email. All the changes are on our side, so you can keep using your free email domain and we'll handle the rest.

We’ll use either the send.mailchimpapp.com or mail.mailchimpapp.com subdomains as the From domain for your email address. When receiving servers look at your email, the From email address will match the domain the email is being sent from, so it should pass the DMARC check. Replies from recipients will still go to your From address.

Here’s an example of what a From address could look like with the subdomain added.

Original
thepottedplanter@yahoo.com

With Mailchimp's change
thepottedplanter.yahoo.com@send.mailchimpapp.com

We’ll notify you in the email builder if we make this change.

This solution will help, but it can’t fix all delivery issues. If you choose to use your own paid domain or a private domain, we won’t make any changes to your From address when you send email in Mailchimp.