What You'll Learn

  • Why emails from your business domain may show up as unverified
  • What SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records actually do
  • How unverified emails affect trust and deliverability
  • Simple steps to authenticate your business email

Why This Matters

When your emails arrive with a warning label or land in spam, potential customers may never see your message. It can also make the message feel less familiar or harder to verify.

Email authentication often receives less attention than other parts of a local business's digital presence.

What Causes Unverified Emails

Most unverified email issues come from missing or misconfigured DNS records:

  • SPF records tell email servers which sources are allowed to send email from your domain
  • DKIM records add a digital signature to verify the email was not altered in transit
  • DMARC records let a domain owner publish a policy and receive reports when messages do not pass aligned SPF or DKIM authentication

Missing, incomplete, or misaligned authentication can increase the chance that messages are rejected, marked as spam, or shown with warnings. Authentication improves identity verification, but it does not guarantee inbox placement.

How to Fix It

Step 1: Check Your Current Email Authentication

Review every service that sends mail for the business, then inspect the domain's SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Diagnostic tools can help, but compare the results with the requirements of the email provider and each authorized sender.

Step 2: Add or Update DNS Records

Your domain or DNS provider usually provides a settings panel for the required records. Add only values supplied or approved by the services that send mail for the domain. A staged DMARC policy and reporting period may be appropriate before stronger enforcement.

Step 3: Test Your Emails

Send tests through each authorized service, inspect authentication results in the message headers, monitor provider reports, and confirm that ordinary business mail, forms, CRM messages, and campaigns continue to work.

Key Takeaway: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and domain alignment help receiving systems verify legitimate mail and protect the domain from impersonation. Google's email sender guidelines describe current Gmail requirements. Setup time and complexity depend on the complete sending stack.

If you are not sure where to start, reach out to Markivia Digital and we can help map the systems sending mail before DNS changes are made.