What it usually looks like
- Gmail puts your emails into spam, while Outlook or iCloud accept them, or the other way round.
- The form on your site “doesn’t work”: a client sends a request and nothing reaches you. Often it’s the same problem.
- Emails from the website (order confirmations, password resets) don’t arrive.
- Everything broke after moving to a new hosting or a newsletter service.
- Clients’ replies say “the message failed authentication”.
Why it happens
Mail services check whether the sender is allowed to write from your domain. SPF is the list of servers that are. DKIM is a signature that proves the email wasn’t changed on the way. DMARC is the rule for what to do when neither SPF nor DKIM confirmed the domain in the “From” field, and where to send reports. If the records are missing or were made for an old hosting, the email looks suspicious. When the website sends email from shared hosting, the reputation of someone else’s address comes into play too, and records alone won’t fix it.
Since 2024 Gmail and Yahoo, and since 2025 Outlook, check stricter than anyone: without SPF or DKIM they don’t accept email from anyone, and from senders of five thousand emails a day they also require DMARC and one-click unsubscribe. If the email was set up long ago and never touched, the records are most likely just not there.
What I’ll do
- Find out who really sends email from your domain: the mail service, the website, CRM, newsletters.
- Check SPF, DKIM, DMARC and how the server introduces itself, and show what exactly is wrong.
- Fix the DNS records and set up the signature for every sender.
- Turn on DMARC reports in monitoring mode and set up a readable view of them instead of raw files. We tighten the rule only when every sender passes, otherwise some forgotten service breaks.
- A day later, when the records have spread, I test delivery to Gmail, Outlook and iCloud and send you the result. A week later I check again.
What I need from you
Where the domain’s DNS records live: usually where you bought the domain. Don’t know where that is? We’ll find it together. Access isn’t required: we can do it on a call, you share the screen, I tell you what to change. If access is needed after all, you create a separate account for me and remove it when we’re done.
How long it takes
A usual case, one mail service and a website: I fix the records in an hour and check the result a day later, because DNS and signatures don’t take effect right away. If there are many senders or the domain is already on blacklists, it takes a few days of waiting, and I’ll tell you right away. If a week later the emails are in spam again, I finish it as part of the same task.
