Google, Yahoo and Apple recently announced a joint effort to reduce the number of unwanted emails received by users. Their new guidelines largely focus on three areas: authentication of outgoing emails, reported spam rates and the ability to easily unsubscribe from email lists. Beginning in February 2024, they started enforcing the new requirements, and are planning to move to stricter enforcement in June 2024. 

The UW–Madison Eloqua instance and all of our users are subject to these new requirements.  

Oracle Eloqua provides us with a default email setting (accessible by administrators only) that provides a list unsubscribe notification in all of our outbound emails. This information is added to the code of the email, i.e. the "back end header details," and is not visible or editable by Eloqua users. It notifies Email Service Providers (ESP) of the presence of a list unsubscribe. This fulfills another one of the specific requirements.

To reduce the possibility of having messages marked as spam and to provide an easy unsubscribe, the Marketing Automation Team will also implement a clearly visible unsubscribe link to be used on the header of all Email assets sent out via our UW–Madison Eloqua instance. There will be one default Eloqua email header that each and every campus email will have set by default. This unsubscribe link will remove any recipients who click on it from the Email Asset's Email Group.  

The UW–Madison Marketing Automation team has already confirmed our sender authentication settings, which satisfies another major requirement. By implementing these changes, UW–Madison emails sent via Oracle Eloqua will be in full compliance with the new ESP requirements.

For more background on these important and unavoidable changes, see DoIT's January 9, 2024 announcement. A Knowledge Base document from the DoIT Productivity and Collaborative Solution group (PCS) offers additional details: https://kb.wisc.edu/136315.