Can I send from my Gmail address?

The answer and the date

Since 16 July 2024 it has not been possible to use an @gmail.com address to send emails to your list through systeme.io.

The trigger was Google, not systeme.io. Google strengthened its sender requirements from 1 February 2024, and an account sending more than 5,000 emails a day is treated as a bulk sender, with rejection and spam filtering as the risks.

Google's own sender guidelines draw that line more narrowly than the systeme.io article does. The 5,000 counts messages sent to Gmail accounts in a day, not everything you send. What matters is how much of your list is on Gmail, rather than the size of the list.

Below that threshold the requirements still stand. Google names SPF or DKIM authentication on the sending domain, valid forward and reverse DNS records, a TLS connection, and no impersonating Gmail in the From header. Those apply to every sender writing to a Gmail address from February 2024 onwards.

Which free addresses are refused

The Microsoft domains are the only free ones still working, and the .fr versions of each are covered too. systeme.io advises against using them anyway, on the grounds that they cause significant deliverability problems.

What to use instead

An address on a domain you own, in the shape contact@yourdomain.com.

It has to be a working mailbox, able to send and receive mail, not a label that points nowhere. Then the domain gets authenticated, which is what tells inbox providers that systeme.io is allowed to send for it.

The upside is not only that it works. A domain you own accumulates its own sending reputation, which a shared free domain cannot do on your behalf.

What happens to the automatic emails

Transactional emails, the automatic ones about logins and purchases, still need somewhere to come from. An account without a valid professional sender address gets one generated on the systemeapp.com domain.

The format is useremail@transactional.systemeapp.com. An account signed up with example@gmail.com sends transactional mail from example=gmail.com@transactional.systemeapp.com, with a Reply-To added so replies land back in the original inbox.

This applies to transactional emails only. It runs in the background and does not appear anywhere in the dashboard, and it does nothing for marketing emails.

The account address is a different thing

The restriction is on what your emails are sent from, not on which address the account belongs to. systeme.io's own example of the transactional fallback is a user who signed up with a Gmail address, and the address linked to your login is the one systeme.io does not make you confirm by hand.