I’ve recently heard from a few dog trainers who are having email problems — their clients aren’t getting their emails! Sometimes it’s their personal emails, sometimes it’s their email newsletters, and other times it’s emails from their booking platform. But while things used to work seamlessly, they’re finding email problems have popped up in the last few months.

Some of them may vaguely remember getting an email mentioning that they needed to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for their domains, but the emails sounded technical and, frankly, overwhelming. So they put it off until later and figured they’d deal with it if it caused issues. And now they’re seeing issues!

So, what gives?

If all those letters just read as alphabet soup to you, let’s talk a bit about what they are and why they matter. We’ll also guide you through what you should do to ensure you don’t run into any deliverability issues.

How Email Works: A High-Level Overview

First, it’s helpful to have a rough idea how email works.

1. Your inbox, where you write and receive email, is called your email client. When you write an email and click send, your email client sends that email to your outgoing email server. A server is basically a fancy computer always connected to the internet.
2. Your outgoing server looks at the address information on your email — who you are sending that email to — to figure out where their email server lives.
3. Your email goes to your recipient’s email server and is evaluated to see if it’s spam or junk mail.
4. Assuming it passes the test and is deemed “not spam,” your email is delivered to your recipient’s inbox.

That process looks roughly like this:

If you use a free Gmail account or a Google Workspace account, your outgoing server is maintained by Google. If your recipient is using a Yahoo.com account, their email server is maintained by Yahoo.

If you’re using a FREE email address from your website host, your email server is maintained by your hosting company.

Sending Email Through a Third Party

What happens if you’re using an email marketing platform or a booking tool for dog trainers (like Acuity or Dog Biz Pro) and want them to send emails for you?

Depending on what platform or tool you’re using they may create an email address for you that they’ll use when sending out email on your behalf. OR they may allow you to set up your account to use your own email address as the “from” address on emails sent from your account.

You can tell which is true for your account by looking at the “From” information on an email sent out from that platform. Here’s what it looks like from the booking tool I use, Calendly.

You can see here that the from email address is Calendly uses is notifications@calendly.com. However, I use ConvertKit as my email marketing platform. Emails that come from ConvertKit will show the from email address as coming from my personal email. (Not sure how to set this up? Check out our article on Creating a ConvertKit Account).

Where the Email Problems Began: New Requirements from Google & Yahoo

In order to prevent common spam techniques, Google and Yahoo decided to add new verification requirements that began rolling out in February 2024.

These new requirements have three parts:

1. SPF Record
2. DKIM Record
3. DMARC Record

Your recipient’s server now checks these each time you send an email. The recipient’s server pings the outgoing server to see what those files say and checks that those files exist.

If you’re having email problems it’s likely because you or your website manager didn’t set these up — or because they’re set up incorrectly. If you use a FREE account like Gmail, that company would have set this up for you for your personal email. But, you won’t be able to add these records for any third party senders (that is, your email marketing platform or your booking tool) because you don’t own the domain that those emails come from (gmail.com).

If you use a free email address from your hosting company or one via Google Workspace (or one of their competitors), then you or your web person needs to add these records to your account.

So what are these three records and why do we need all three?

SPF Records and their role in preventing spam

You need one SPF record for each domain that you use to send out email. An SPF record lists out all of the places that may be sending out emails using your email address. That includes, for example, Google Workspace, your booking tool (Acuity, Dog Biz Pro, etc.), and your email marketing platform (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc).

Basically, when someone gets an email that says it’s from you but comes from a server other than your domain’s servers, they check your domain’s server to see if the place it came from is included on that list.

DKIM Records and their role in preventing spam

OK, so that’s a great first measure of security. But what’s stopping someone else who is also using that service from pretending to be you?

That’s where your DKIM Record comes in. You’ll have a separate DKIM record for each service on your SPF record. Your DKIM record is a digital signature unique to that service and to your account. After checking that the sending server is listed on your SPF record, your recipient’s server will look to see if the DKIM on the email they just received matches the one stored on your server.

DMARC Records and their role in preventing spam

If an email sender is NOT on your SPF list or if it fails the DKIM check, your DMARC record tells your recipient’s server what to do with that email.

It can say to do nothing. This tells their server to go ahead and deliver that email to their inbox. This was the most common recommendation when the changes were initially released. This allowed time to check that all of the necessary accounts were added to SPF records and that each had a corresponding DKIM record.

It can say to send those emails to spam. This means your email will go to your recipient’s spam folder, so it’s still findable. It essentially covers your bases if you think you’re covered but there’s a chance you’ve accidentally missed a service or two.

Or it can say to not deliver the email at all. In this case your emails would not show up for the recipient — not even in their spam folder. This provides the greatest level of security. However it also means if you’ve forgotten a service, there’s a chance emails from those services will never reach their recipients.

What to do if YOU are having Email Problems

These new requirements are almost certainly causing your email problems if some of your emails aren’t arriving at their intended destination.

If you’ve partly set things up, you’re likely receiving DMARC reports. These can help you find which of your accounts is missing in your SPF records or lacking a DKIM record.

However, if you were simply overwhelmed and didn’t set up any of these records, it means to fix your email problems we need to get these new requirements set up for your email address. Each service you’re using should have either a help article or have their support team available to provide you with the information you need to add these records for their service.

For most dog trainers, you’ll add these records in your website’s hosting account. Rarely, they’ll instead need be to added wherever you registered your domain name instead. If you need help figuring this out, hop on a coaching call with me and we can fix these settings live. You can pay for and schedule a coaching call with me here.