BFCM 2026: Are You Ready?

Black Friday/Cyber Monday approaches! What will this year hold in the way of deliverability challenges?When I surveyed readers last year about their biggest mailbox provider challenges during Q4, Microsoft Outlook.com took the top spot. Microsoft was clearly the biggest source of inbox pain last holiday season. They are likely to continue leading the pack for sender deliverability headaches this year, but I predirect that Google’s Gmail is going to be a very close second.The 2026 Landscape: Gmail Enforcement and GPT V2Google has spent the past year steadily ramping up enforcement of its enhanced sender guidelines. And it isn’t just resulting in spam folder placement. Nowadays, previously assumed-to-be-compliant senders are seeing lots more mail rejected outright with permanent 5xx failure codes.At the same time, Google has fully completed its migration to Google Postmaster Tools V2. While V2 retired the legacy IP and domain reputation tier graphs that senders relied on for years, it…