Incoming Crisis: Your Emails Are About to Hit a Wall! Will Your Clients Still Get Your Messages?

?? Getting your emails out to your mailing list has always had its challenges.

Will they get sent to spam and missed? ??

Well, it's about to get a whole lot worse. ??

Google and Yahoo are determined to route out low quality emails and either spam them or, worse, not deliver them at all.

If your clients use Gmail or Yahoo, this is already happening.

??♂?A friend of mine stopped receiving messages from over 40 of his websites as well as direct messages to his inbox. It literally went quiet—the last thing you want as a business owner.

It was not obvious what was going on at first, as he is not using Gmail.

These changes started earlier this year and are getting fully implemented this month.

Where Google goes, others tend to follow, so its really important to get on top of this unless you want to become invisible.

I have already noticed that a number of webhosts and email autoresponders have already enforced this, often with no communications that they have done this.

If you are a small, one-person, or fractional business, this is your lifeblood. ??

There are three potential measures that you need to prove you are a legitimate business...

??SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Think of SPF as a way for email providers to prove an email claiming to come from your domain (like yourcompany.com) is actually from you.

It’s sort of like a list of trusted servers allowed to send emails on your behalf. If an email isn’t sent from one of these trusted sources, it might get blocked completely or marked as spam.

??DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM works like an email signature. When you send an email, DKIM attaches a hidden signature that proves it's really from you and hasn’t been tampered with during transit.

This helps email providers trust that your messages.

??DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance): DMARC ties SPF and DKIM together.

It tells email providers what to do if an email fails SPF or DKIM checks: either accept, reject, or mark it as spam.

It also gives you reports on how your emails are doing, so you know if anything dodgy is happening.

By the way, these reports come in frequently and can be a distraction. You may want to filter this or risk clogging your inbox. ??

In short, these three tools work together to make sure your emails are trusted and don’t end up in spam, while protecting your domain against scammers.

These are records that are added to your domain via the Domain Name Server (DNS).

It is possible that your email provider, webhost or domain provider may give you a tool to do this. However, quite a few have left people to their own devices.

This is not the most straightforward thing to do, but there is free help out there on the web and a tool to check if your domain is already compliant.

??Have a look at: https://easydmarc.com/tools

In theory, the emails seem to work if you just have SPF and DMARC in place.

DKIM is definitely more complicated to setup, but the site will generate the encryption keys you need for this.

If necessary, use your supplier's support service if you get stuck.

I have noticed that if your domain doesn't have SPF and DMARC set, several things seem to happen:

?If your website uses WordPress and the default WP-Mail method to send emails from your contact forms, these don't even get sent, let alone arrive.

?In some cases, the email doesn't appear at all in Gmail. Its difficult to be sure if the domain didn't send it or if Google dropped it, but neither scenario is any good!

?Finally, if it does make it through, it WILL end up in spam.

I hope this is a timely warning and gives you time to act. Your email list is your business and this will be a nightmare for deliverability if you don't act promptly.

Everyone I talked to seemed to be unaware this is looming, so definitely time to get a heads up out to everyone.

Let me know if you have any questions.

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