Guide · Technical
Why your quotes
land in spam.
A quote that lands in spam is a lost job, and the business never finds out. Three records in your domain's DNS decide most of it, and on a large share of small business domains at least one of them is missing or wrong.
Published 2026-09-24 · Formory Group
What the three records do.
SPF lists which mail servers are allowed to send email using your domain. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to each message so the receiver can confirm it was not altered and did come from you. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks, and asks them to report back.
None of them is optional any more in practice. Major providers apply progressively stricter handling to unauthenticated mail, and messages that fail all three checks increasingly do not arrive at all rather than landing in a spam folder someone might check.
Set them up in order.
SPF first, listing every service that sends mail as you — your mail provider, and anything else: the website's contact form, an invoicing tool, a booking system, a newsletter service. Forgetting one is the single most common cause of a specific type of message vanishing while the rest arrive.
Then DKIM, which your mail provider generates for you. Then DMARC, starting in the mode that only reports rather than rejecting, so you can see what is being sent as you before you start blocking anything.
Why it usually breaks after a website change.
Moving a website means changing DNS, and DNS is also where the mail records live. A new provider setting up records from scratch will get the website right and can easily omit the mail records, because nothing about the website will look broken when they do.
If email problems started within days of a site move, this is the first place to look, not the last.
The forwarding trap.
Automatic forwarding from one address to another breaks SPF, because the forwarding server is not on your permitted list. This is why messages that go directly arrive fine and the same messages forwarded to a personal address disappear.
The fix is to collect mail properly at the destination rather than forwarding, or to use a forwarding service that handles the rewriting correctly.
What to check quarterly.
That you still have exactly one SPF record — two is a common fault that invalidates both. That every sending service you have added since is listed. And that the DMARC reports, if you enabled them, do not show mail being sent as you from somewhere you do not recognise.
That last one is also how domain impersonation is caught early, which matters more for a business whose customers receive invoices.
Questions
Straight answers.
Does this affect my website's SEO?
No, these are mail records and have nothing to do with search ranking. They affect whether your business correspondence arrives, which for most businesses matters more.
Can I have two SPF records?
No. A domain must have exactly one, listing all permitted senders together. Two records is treated as an error and can cause everything to fail.
Do I need this if I use Gmail or Microsoft 365 for my domain?
Yes. Those providers make the records easy to generate, but somebody still has to add them to your DNS, and that step is often skipped.
Now check your own
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