SPF, DMARC and DKIM Woes

Hello everyone,

After sending out the most recent newsletter I received feedback that many people had found the newsletter after the fact marked as spam and automatically kept it from their inbox usually by placing it in their designated spam folder for a few days/weeks/months (this will depend on the email client settings/provider) until it is purged, never to be seen.

I did some investigating and spent the last few days picking away at ensuring that future newsletters/emails sent from the @dev.lightspeedta.co address via the nobreaks.ca domain. To do this a few things needed to be implemented including some DNS TXT records. I won’t get into much detail but it’s worth mentioning that the SPF, DMARC and DKIM records all work together as multiple forms of verification for messages being sent from the domain ensuring that only messages sent from authorized sources will be processed and sent out to their recipients.

I got to the point where I had my SPF and DMARC records but once it came to the DKIM, something critical to the successful receipt of an email for many large providers. After some digging I was finding myself in a drought of information for the configuration of DKIM with our domain host (1&1 Ionos) and couldn’t even figure out where to get my domain key details to start. After a semi-short call to support to figure out of it was even supported with their hosting services I was informed by an administrator that no, DKIM support was not available currently.

Now, this is a big deal to me and seems like a critical aspect to have if you have any hope of successfully and securely communicating with users/clients or whoever your domain reaches out to. Rather than transferring and moving to another host that supported DKIM I looked into what it would cost to simply move the email services (although these are included with the domain with 1&1 Ionos) and found that Rackspace offers reasonably priced email services for domains in sets of 4.

Currently I’ve updated the MX records and changed all the necessary details for the various emails we send out (Requests, Newsletters, Contact Us replies, etc) and all seems well and preliminary tests of outbound messages have landed them in Inboxes as expected.

That’s all for now!

-LightSpeedTaco