Gmail is a free email service that is coming to the end of free.

Google wants to sell more Google Workspace accounts to for-profit and non-profit organizations. Unfortunately, a soccer tournament is one such organization. Google has decided that the volume and pattern of traffic that most tournaments generate looks like spam to their algorithms.

Even if you don’t use gmail to manage your soccer tournament, a lot of folks use gmail, so this new direction in Google’s business model will affect you in your ability to reach your teams, referees, other team members.

You can’t appeal to Google (believe me, we’ve tried!) so you just need to change the way you send out emails. And pay money, of course.

The easiest way to manage this is to sign up for a PAID Google Workspace account, link up your domain to receive and send emails, and make sure the SPF record and DKIM keys are active. After those two things are verified, you should then install a DMARC record on your domain (I know, it’s a bit tech-y, but since Google wants you to sign up for their paid email, they make it easy. And, if TourneyCentral holds your domain, we can talk you through the Google end and edit your DNS records for you.)

If your club uses a professional email service with their domain name, and they have SPF, DKIM and DMARC all set up, you may want to ask them for an outgoing email address, like do_not_reply@soccerclubname.com

Then, you can install this in the “Outgoing Email From” fields in your Website Maint Module>Variables>GO! Be sure to send out a sample team application or contact request to make sure the email address works.

We have set up an email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to help aid in email delivery at do_not_reply@trnyctrl.com as the default. As of Jan 1, 2023, this will be the only outgoing email address you will be able to use unless you take over management of your domain and set up with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. As of December 31, 2023, we will no longer register or pay for a custom domain. If you wish to maintain your domain, you should set up an account at GoDaddy and request that we transfer ownership to you. Also, if you have your domain pointed to our server IP, you should set up a forwarding to your https://[event-name].tourneycentral.com address instead UNLESS you have arranged an SSL Cert with us on your domain.

In some cases, using an alternative domain to your website domain fixes the problem, at least temporarily. We can help secure an alternative domain which you use only for outgoing email. But we suspect that Google will eventually tag and block any domain used for email that does not have SPF, DKIM AND DMARC. In short, you should budget at least a few hundred dollars more a year for professional email.

The key to this appears to be Google cracking down on emails that do not have SPF, DKIM AND DMARC records. Fortunately, most professional email services will have them if you link up your domain to their servers. But it appears the use of gmail.com address for high-volume organizations is coming to a rapid end.