Your Business Email Might Not Be Arriving

If you have ever sent a quote and had a customer say they never received it, the email probably arrived. It just landed in a folder nobody checks.

Email deliverability is one of the least visible parts of running a business online and one of the most expensive when it goes wrong, because nothing tells you it happened. There is no bounce, no error, no notification. The message simply is not read.

Why inboxes are suspicious by default

Mail providers assume a new sender might be a spammer until shown otherwise. That is not unreasonable given the volume of fraudulent mail sent every day, but it means legitimate small businesses get caught in the same net — particularly ones sending low volumes from a domain with no established reputation.

Three records, published in your domain’s DNS settings, are how you prove you are who you claim to be.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC, in plain terms

SPF is a list of servers allowed to send mail using your domain. It lets a receiving server check whether the message came from somewhere you approved, or from a stranger using your name.

DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to each message. If the message is altered in transit, or forged entirely, the signature does not verify.

DMARC ties the two together and tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails: ignore it, quarantine it, or reject it. It also lets you receive reports on who is sending mail as you, which is often an unpleasant surprise.

None of these are optional any more. Google and Yahoo both tightened their requirements for bulk senders, and the direction of travel is clear: unauthenticated mail increasingly does not arrive.

The @gmail problem

Sending business mail from a free Gmail or Hotmail address costs you twice. It looks less credible — a quote from yourbusiness@gmail.com reads as smaller and less permanent than one from you@yourbusiness.ca. And it gives you no domain reputation to build on, because the reputation belongs to Gmail rather than to you.

Worse is the common halfway house: a contact form on your website that sends mail claiming to be from the visitor’s address. That fails SPF almost by definition, because your web server is not an authorised sender for a stranger’s domain. Forms should send from your own domain and set the visitor’s address as the reply-to.

Things that quietly damage your reputation

• Buying a contact list. Recipients who never opted in mark you as spam, and that signal follows your domain.
• Sending newsletters from the same server as your website, so a traffic spike delays your mail.
• Never cleaning your list. Repeatedly mailing dead addresses is a strong spam signal.
• No visible unsubscribe link. Removing it does not keep subscribers; it converts them into complaints.

A short checklist

• Use an address on your own domain for anything business-related.
• Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, and confirm they actually validate rather than assuming.
• Send marketing mail through a service built for it, not from your web server.
• Send yourself a test message and read the headers, or use a free deliverability checker. Both take minutes.

Email is still where most business gets done. It is worth the half hour it takes to confirm yours is arriving.