You quoted a job on Tuesday. By Friday you'd heard nothing, and you filed it under went with someone cheaper — the way you file most of them, because that's usually what happened.
Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the message was sorted into a spam folder before anyone read the subject line, and the silence is identical either way. The customer thinks you never replied. You think they went quiet. Nobody is told, which is the whole problem: an email that fails this way fails without an error, without a bounce, and without a single clue on your end that anything went wrong.
Three records decide whether you're believed#
When a message arrives claiming to be from your business, the receiving server has to make a judgement in a fraction of a second about whether it really is. It does that by looking up three public records attached to your domain. They're not secret, they're not technical trophies, and anyone can read yours right now — including your customers' mail providers, which is exactly what they do.
SPF — who is allowed to send as you
A list of the servers permitted to put your name on a message. If your mail goes out through Google and your website's contact form goes out through your host, both need to be on that list. A server that isn't listed is a message the receiver has to decide about with no help from you.
DKIM — a signature that survives the journey
A cryptographic signature added to the message itself. Unlike SPF, it travels with the mail, so it still proves the message is yours after it's been forwarded — which matters more than it sounds, because a customer forwarding your quote to their partner is the normal path a quote takes.
DMARC — what to do when the first two fail
The instruction you give receivers about messages that fail the checks above: let them through, set them aside, or refuse them. Without it, the other two are advice rather than a rule, and each receiving company falls back on its own judgement about your mail.
Why this is so often the website's fault#
Your day-to-day email is probably fine. It was set up once, it goes out through a mailbox provider that got the records right, and you'd have noticed years ago if it weren't working.
The mail that breaks is the mail your website sends: the notification when somebody fills in your contact form, the copy of the quote your booking page sends, the password reset from your customer area. That mail leaves from a different machine than your normal email does — your web host's, or a sending service the site was wired up to — and unless somebody deliberately added that machine to your SPF record, it's a stranger claiming to be you.
This is why the failure is so lopsided. The mail you'd notice works. The mail nobody watches is the mail carrying your leads.
| What changed | What it does to your mail |
|---|---|
| The website was rebuilt or moved host | Form notifications now leave from a machine your SPF record has never heard of |
| You added a newsletter or booking service | A second sender, often with its own setup steps that got skipped at the end of a busy week |
| Someone added a second SPF record | The worst outcome of the lot — see below |
| You switched mailbox provider | The old provider's servers usually stay in the record, and the new one's sometimes never make it in |
What to actually do#
Find out what yours say before changing anything. These records are public, so this costs nothing and takes seconds. Our free email check reads all three for your domain and tells you plainly what it found — no account, and no email needed to see the result.
Then send the result to whoever holds your domain. That might be your web person, your IT support, or you with a login you haven't used since you bought the name. These changes happen in the DNS settings at your registrar, they take minutes for someone who has done it before, and they are the sort of thing that is genuinely easy to get subtly wrong — a stray character in an SPF record is not a syntax error, it's a silently weaker one.
Test the path that actually matters. Fill in your own contact form from a phone, using an address at a different provider from your own — a Gmail address if your business runs on Microsoft, or the reverse. That's the journey your leads take, and it's the one nobody ever tries.
Related: a contact form people actually finish, which is the step before this one, and why your website isn't getting you leads, which covers the ones that never reached the form at all.