Bits and pieces before the holidays

In this email we have a few housekeeping bits and pieces before the holidays

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Email Delivery Issues & Reminder To Update Your SPF Records

We’ve been getting a ton of support enquiries from customers in the last month with email delivery issues and their emails going to spam.

Many of these clients are missing SPF or DKIM records so figured it would be a good idea to remind you to update these.

Earlier this year Google, Microsoft and all the big email players dialed up their spam filters to be more aggressive. This means that if you don’t have a correct set of SPF records for your domain name then your emails will likely end up in spam.

An SPF record is a DNS record that tells the internet what servers or systems are allowed to send email on your behalf. At a minimum your SPF record will need to include your email hosting and your web hosting. Any other systems sending email on your behalf like a sales CRM or ticket system will also need to be added to your SPF record.

You can check your SPF records using a tool like MX toolbox – click here to check yours

The output will look something like below. This is the SPF record for our domain – we send email via Sendgrid, Zendesk and Gsuite so these are listed as part of the SPF record

Ideally you also want to have DKIM records setup for each of the systems sending email for you too. DKIM records help email systems verify that your emails are genuine and authentic and can help stop people sending spam using your domain.

You should be able to find the instructions for setting up SPF and DKIM records for the software that sends email for you by searching in Google.

The SPF record will be the same for everyone using that provider but the DKIM record will be unique for each domain name.

Ideally you also want a third record or system setup too, a DMARC record. This record is used in conjunction with software to manage both records and will report on systems sending email that is failing both these records.

Cloudflare provide a free DMARC management service and is easy to setup. You can set this up under the Email menu in Cloudflare as per the screenshot below. You can see in the screenshot that Amazon, Sendgrid and Multacom corporation sent emails for this domain and had a 0% pass rate which indicates that something is up here. Either the records need updating or someone is sending spam from these systems using this domain name.

Update your Google Maps holiday operating hours + pause your Google Ads

If you’re closing over the holidays and have an active Google Maps listing it’s worth updating your holiday hours there too. If you’re a bigger business or get a lot of in person traffic then it’s probably a good idea to update Bing Places and Apple Maps with your holiday hours too. Links below to go to these services directly:

bingplaces.com

google.com/local/add

https://businessconnect.apple.com/

There is an option inside the Google Business Profile settings to add specific holiday hours.

If you’re running Google Ads and closed for the holidays it might be worth pausing those over the holidays too.

Thats it for this email, any questions, just hit reply.