Why your business email lands in spam, and how to fix it
If mail from your own domain keeps disappearing into junk folders, the cause is usually three settings that were never configured. Here's what SPF, DKIM and DMARC do, in plain English.
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You send an invoice and it never arrives. A customer swears they didn’t get your reply. Your quote sits in a junk folder nobody checks. If mail from your own domain keeps vanishing, the cause is usually the same, and it’s fixable.
Why it happens
Email was built in a more trusting time, when anyone could send a message claiming to be anyone. Spammers abused that for decades, so the big mail providers got strict. Now, before Gmail or Outlook drops your message in the inbox, they check whether it can prove it’s really from your domain. If your domain can’t prove it, your mail looks exactly like the fake stuff, and it gets treated that way.
The proof comes from three settings on your domain. They have off-putting names. What they do is simple enough.
SPF: who’s allowed to send
SPF is a list. It names the servers allowed to send email for your domain, whether that’s Google, Microsoft, your newsletter tool, or all of them. When a message arrives, the receiver checks the sender against your list. On the list, fine. Not on it, suspicious.
DKIM: a signature that can’t be forged
DKIM adds a hidden signature to every message you send, one that only your domain could have produced. The receiver checks it against a key published on your domain. If it matches, the message hasn’t been tampered with and it genuinely came from you.
DMARC: what to do with the rest
DMARC ties the first two together and tells receivers what to do when a message fails the checks. Let it through, send it to spam, or reject it outright. It also reports who is sending mail in your name, which is how you catch someone spoofing your domain to scam your customers.
Getting them right
None of this is exotic. The catch is that the three settings have to agree with each other and with every service you send mail through, and a small mistake can make things worse rather than better. A DMARC policy set too strict on day one can bin your own legitimate mail. Set too loose, it does nothing at all.
Done carefully, you configure it once and stop thinking about it. Your invoices arrive. Your replies get read. And the day someone tries to send a fake invoice pretending to be you, it bounces.
The wider setup
Email is one piece of the plumbing a business runs on, alongside the domain it sits on and the accounts around it. If your mail is misbehaving, it’s worth checking the rest while you’re in there, because the same neglect usually touches all of it.
That’s what our Business essentials service covers: professional email on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, the authentication configured properly, and the domain and access sorted around it. If your mail keeps disappearing, send us the details and we’ll find out why.
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