Bulk email and marketing email
Mail sent to a list because you decided to send it, not because one person triggered it. Newsletters and campaigns, held to stricter rules.
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What it is
Bulk email goes out because you decided to send it, not because one recipient triggered it: the newsletter, the product announcement, the Black Friday campaign. Nobody is waiting for it, which flips every assumption. You need provable consent to send it, a working unsubscribe in every message, and a reputation good enough that thousands of near-identical messages arriving at once do not look like an attack.
The 2024 bulk sender rules are stated per provider, so read them that way. Google counts you as a bulk sender once you send around 5,000 messages in a day to personal Gmail accounts, and applies its full checklist from there. Yahoo published requirements of the same shape for bulk senders without attaching a public message-count threshold. Both want SPF and DKIM passing, DMARC published with an aligned From, one-click unsubscribe via the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers, unsubscribes honored within two days, and complaints kept low (Google names 0.3 percent as the line you must not cross and 0.1 percent as the level to sit under). Check each provider's current page before you quote a number, because the thresholds and dates have moved before. Send from a marketing subdomain such as 'news.example.com' so a bad campaign never touches the domain your password resets ride on.
The classic self-inflicted wound: calling a campaign transactional because it happens to mention an order. Filters judge content and recipient behavior, not your internal label, so a receipt stuffed with a discount grid is a marketing message that just lost the protection receipts get. The other one is volume shock, where a domain that normally sends 200 messages a day suddenly sends 80,000 and gets throttled into a deferral spiral.
Ask AI for it
Build a bulk campaign sending flow that passes the Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender requirements, stating each provider's rule and threshold separately rather than as one blended standard. Send only to addresses with a recorded double opt-in timestamp and source, from a dedicated marketing subdomain (news.example.com) with SPF, DKIM, and a DMARC policy that aligns with the visible From domain. Add List-Unsubscribe with both a mailto and an https URL plus List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click, and process those POSTs automatically within minutes with no login and no confirmation page. Before each send, diff the segment against the suppression list, then dispatch in throttled batches with per-provider concurrency caps rather than one giant burst. Include a plain-text part, a real postal address, and ingest bounce and complaint webhooks so the next campaign is smaller and cleaner than the last.