Are Your Emails being Delivered? Do This One Thing Now to Check

With domain authentication now a requirement for email, if you noticed that some of your emails were not getting through from the beginning of the year, you were not imagining it. Changes to email security may well mean they are not being delivered to all inboxes. 

In a new article for CommPRO.biz, "To Know If Your Emails Are Getting Through, You Need To Do This One Thing Now,"  I write that I noticed that personal business emails suddenly stopped being delivered early in January. Since I specifically use GoDaddy and Microsoft 365 email as a high-quality, high-trust service, this was a surprise, and a mission-critical problem.   

One thing I knew to do was to use an email testing application to see if the deliverability score was the issue. Rather than the usual 10-out-of-10 rating, we were at 6.5. In my experience, anything less than 9.5, means corporate systems will block or quarantine emails.

My development team suggested I reach out to GoDaddy. Their email support team recognized the problem and that DNS configurations related to our emails had to be reset.

Once the changes have been implemented (they need 24-48 hours to take effect), the delivery score for our email, which had dropped to 4.5 (pretty much undeliverable), were back to normal and emails were getting through. Because we use CloudFlare as an additional level of domain protection, this also required a fix.            

As I note in the CommPRO article, at the same time as we were having challenges, pretty much every email newsletter I had signed up for, including those from high-quality sources like The Wall Street Journal, were not being delivered and were going into email quarantine. These require whitelisting if you want to receive them.  

The takeaway: “If you have a newsletter, unless it is going to a Gmail address, has been white labeled, and/or you have updated the DNS settings, it is likely disappearing into the void.”

Email has always been a challenge, especially when sending to larger groups, but the hurdles in 2024 are higher than ever. For larger companies this will not be news. For most of the smaller businesses I have been talking to since the beginning of the year these changes are a surprise and email providers seem to be doing a mixed job of sharing what needs to be done. Since emails may still be delivered in Gmail, you may not even know there’s an issue.     

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man using an email tester to know they have a problem is king.

We use mail-tester.com. The process is as simple as copying the test email address in the app, sending an email to it, to get a delivery score. If you are getting less than ten, you’ll want to talk to your technology or email consultants or providers, to see what you can do to improve your rating.

The advantage of using an email tester for bulk and personal emails is that it will help you identify both system issues, such as domain authentication, and content issues. Either way, with all the effort that goes into the creation and sending of email you’ll want your eyes wide open when it comes to knowing if your emails are getting through or what you may need to do to fix any issues.    

Simon Erskine Locke is founder & CEO of communications agency and professional search and services platform, CommunicationsMatch™, and CommPRO partner. CommunicationsMatch’s technology helps clients search, shortlist and hire agencies and professionals by industry and communications expertise, location, size, diversity and designations. CommunicationsMatch developed the industry’s first integrated agency search and RFP tools, Agency Select™, with RFP Associates. CommunicationsMatch™ powers PRSA’s Find a Firm agency search tools.