Email Deliverability for Small Teams
Email failure is the quietest failure in business. There's no error, no bounce anyone reads, no complaint. The message simply lands in a spam folder and the recipient never knows it existed.
For a business whose leads arrive by email, this is expensive and entirely invisible.
The three records that decide your fate
SPF lists which servers are allowed to send mail using your domain. If your website sends contact form notifications from your host's server and that server isn't in your SPF record, those notifications are unauthenticated.
Common failure: a hosting migration. New server, same SPF record, and suddenly form notifications stop arriving.
DKIM cryptographically signs your mail so the receiver can verify it wasn't altered and genuinely came from you. Your mail provider gives you a record to publish; publish it.
DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when SPF and DKIM fail, and — the underrated part — where to send reports. Those reports are the only way you'll find out that a system you forgot about has been sending unauthenticated mail as you for two years.
Start DMARC at p=none with reporting on, read the reports for a month, fix what turns up, then tighten to quarantine and eventually reject.
The habits that matter as much as the records
Send from a real address on your domain. Not noreply@, and never from a Gmail address forged through your website. Forms should send as the site and set reply-to as the enquirer.
Warm up new sending domains slowly. A brand-new domain sending two thousand emails on day one looks precisely like a spammer, because that's what spammers do.
Keep your list clean. Repeated sends to dead addresses damage your reputation. Remove hard bounces promptly and stop mailing people who haven't opened anything in a year — they're depressing your engagement metrics, which are a large part of how inbox placement is decided now.
Make unsubscribing effortless. One click, honoured immediately. Making it difficult converts a quiet unsubscribe into a spam complaint, and complaints are the fastest way to damage deliverability.
Separate transactional from marketing. Receipts, password resets, and form notifications should ideally send from a different subdomain than your newsletter. A campaign that gets flagged shouldn't take your password resets down with it.
Test it before you need it
Send a message to a seed address on each major provider and check where it lands. Use a mail tester to confirm your authentication passes. Do this after any hosting change, mail provider change, or DNS work — those are precisely the moments it breaks.
The five-minute version
Check your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records today. If any is missing, that's your afternoon.
Then send yourself a message through your website's contact form and look in the spam folder. If it's there, you have your answer about why the enquiries have been quiet.