Are Your Emails Actually Being Delivered?

This episode of Legal Marketing 101 is brought to you by Thumbs Up Survey. Build better online surveys faster with Thumbs Up Survey. Mention Legal Marketing 101 when you request access to the beta at thumbsupsurveycom to get access to features and discounts. First, thank you to our partners at thumbsupsurveycom. Are your emails actually being delivered? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen.

Do you know if your emails are actually getting delivered to their intended recipients? Sure, if you get a reply, then yeah, you know. But beyond that, do you actually have any idea if your emails or your marketing stuff is actually getting delivered to your potential clients? The reality is most of us don't, unless we're pouring over email marketing stats constantly, and you might be surprised to learn that a higher percentage of your emails than you thought are actually not making it into the inboxes of your potential clients. Instead, your precious marketing and sales emails are getting hit by the junk mail filter and being sent to spam or, worse yet, they're being denied by your potential client's email server before they even get to the spam filter. If this is happening to you though fortunately you probably already know about it If you have a major problem, you're probably going to see emails bounce and you'll probably have clients calling the office angry about how they haven't received the emails you said you would send them, but if neither of those situations are happening to you, I still strongly recommend checking.

I have dropped a great tool from Palisade into the show notes and I use this myself. I also use tools like MX Toolbox, also in the show notes, but Palisade is new and it's really, really cool. So check that out when you have a moment, because today we are going to be talking about fixing the issues that these tools may tell you that you have, and this is going to be a short episode, but we're going to talk about a few things and then I'm going to give you something special. So today we're going to be specifically talking about DKIM, spf and DMARC, or DMARC and I realize that might sound kind of like a new rap group that's currently blowing up on TikTok, but it's actually a set of protocols for email that help us verify to other servers that we are who we say we are and that they should accept our emails, and so you're going to need to know a bit about these three acronyms. So I've asked ChatGPT to help me quickly summarize these components of email sending and how they're related, or, as our TikTok rap group might say, I'm going to break it down.

First up is DKIM, which means domain keys identified mail. Dkim is an email authentication method that allows the sender to attach a digital signature to their emails. This is not the signature you've written in on the bottom of your email. This signature is created using a private key and the corresponding public key that matches. That private key then gets published in our domain's DNS records. When an email is received, the recipient's mail server uses the public key to verify the signature. If the signature matches, it confirms that the email hasn't been tampered with and is indeed from the claimed domain.

Next up, we have SPF, which is Sender Policy Framework, and SPF is a protocol that prevents mail spoofing by allowing domain owners to specify which mail servers, specifically, are permitted to send emails on their behalf. This is done by creating an SPF record in the DNS and listing the authorized IP addresses, the servers where the emails will come from. When an email is received, the recipient's mail server checks the SPF record to ensure the email is coming from an authorized server. If it isn't, the email is likely fraudulent and then can be marked as spam or rejected outright. And then we have DMARC, which is Domain-Based Message, authentication, reporting and Conformance. Dmarc builds on DKIM and SPF by providing a way for domain owners to publish policies on how to handle emails that fail the DKIM or SPF checks. A DMARC record in the DNS specifies how to treat unauthenticated emails, either with a none, a quarantine or a reject policy, and provides an email address to send reports about emails that pass or fail the authentication checks. This helps domain owners like us monitor and enforce email authentication practices. And here's how these systems specifically interact with each other to improve the safety of our email systems.

First, we have SPF checks. When an email is sent, the recipient's mail server first checks the SPF record of the sender's domain to verify that the email is coming from an authorized IP address. This step helps filter out emails sent from unauthorized servers, reducing the risk of spoofing. Next, we have DKIM authentication, and the mail server is going to check the DKIM signature. The DKIM signature ensures the email's content has not been altered in transit and confirms the authenticity of the sender's domain. This step adds an additional layer of trustworthiness to the email. And then, finally, dmarc enforcement. Dmarc ties the results of SPF and DKIM checks together, based on the domain's DMARC policy. The recipient's mail server knows how to handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks. For example, a DMARC policy might instruct the server to quarantine or reject emails that fail these checks, significantly reducing the chances of fraudulent emails reaching the inbox.

And if this is starting to feel complicated, you're absolutely right, it is, and there are a lot of moving parts here. That's just the reality of something like email. So what we're going to do is we're going to wrap up today's episode right here, because I can already feel your eyes glazing over. But here's the thing. Like I said, I have something special for you. So if you go look in the show notes, you're going to see a link to my new email setup instructions on my website. This is a new page that has specific instructions on setting up these three systems SPF, dkim and DMARC. That's all we're focusing on right now. You can follow these instructions step by step, configure these records, configure your domain, configure your email systems, and you're going to get back on track with email in no time.

But if you go and look at this or you've just listened to the episode and all of this seems totally overwhelming and complicated, you're not alone. It felt like that to me too at the beginning. So if you don't want to deal with this, you just want to put it to the side and you want to have someone else handle it, you can feel free to send me an email at contact at roseandadvertisingcom, or visit my website, submit a contact form and I'll do my best to help you out. But here's the thing. This is important. You need to get it done.

I've had a bunch of emails about this in the last six weeks and I've actually done it for myself in the last six weeks. I've updated everything, I've made sure everything looks good, and really I should have been updating this more often, and you should too. So you need to make sure this gets done. When I say push this to the side, I don't mean don't do it. You do need to do this and you're going to need to do it soon. So, to make sure your emails are all being delivered, make sure your deliverability ratings with your email programs are as good as they can possibly be, check out the page on my website and see if you can implement SPF, dkim and DMARC for your domain. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.