SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain English, and why they decide whether your emails get read.
You send a quote and hear nothing back. Often the customer never saw it: it went to spam.
How inboxes decide
Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo check three things before trusting an email from your domain:
- SPF: a list of servers allowed to send email for your domain
- DKIM: a digital signature that proves the email was not changed
- DMARC: tells inboxes what to do with emails that fail those checks
Since 2024, the big providers are much stricter. Missing or wrong records are now one of the main reasons business email lands in spam.
Website forms too
Contact forms on WordPress often send email straight from the web server, which inboxes distrust. Sending them through a proper mail service fixes that.
What to do
Have someone check your DNS records and set them up for the email service you actually use. It usually takes less than a day.
