Business email on your own domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained

An address like info@yourcompany.com.np looks more professional than a free email account, and it keeps company communication under the company's control. But a new domain mailbox that sends straight to customers' spam folders does more harm than good. Three DNS records solve most of these problems.

SPF: who is allowed to send

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS record listing the servers allowed to send email for your domain. When a message arrives claiming to be from your domain, the receiving server checks whether it came from one of those servers.

If you send from your mail server and from a website contact form or a newsletter tool, all of them need to be included.

DKIM: proof the message was not altered

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature to each email. The public key is published in your DNS; receiving servers use it to confirm the message really came from your domain and was not changed on the way.

DMARC: what to do when checks fail

DMARC tells receiving servers what to do if a message fails SPF or DKIM — deliver it anyway, put it in spam, or reject it — and can send you reports about who is sending mail using your domain.

A sensible path is to start with a monitoring policy (p=none), review the reports, then move to quarantine and eventually reject once you are confident all legitimate senders are configured.

Other things that help

• Use a reputable mail server rather than sending directly from a website server.

• Keep mailbox and domain names consistent — sending as one domain from another raises flags.

• Warm up new domains gradually rather than sending large batches on day one.

Moving from free email accounts

Organizations often start with personal accounts and move to domain email later. Messages and contacts can usually be migrated, so the switch does not mean losing history.

We set up business email and webmail with these records configured from the start, and fix delivery problems on existing domains. Contact us if your emails are landing in spam.