We're committed to working on ensuring that your digital communication channels are secure and efficient, and that over time your email systems are given the TLC they need.

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance your cybersecurity and keep things working smoothly, we're taking a focused support initiative aimed at bolstering email reliability.

What We're Doing

Over the coming months we are dedicating around 4 hours per client to review and upgrade your email authentication settings. Our checks will include:

  • Enabling DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) if it's not already — this signs your outgoing messages so a receiving server can verify they were sent using your domain and were not altered in transit
  • Setting up DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) if it isn't there already — the industry standard for email authentication, protecting your domain name from unauthorized use, which is becoming more crucial as Google and Yahoo have recently intensified DMARC enforcement
  • Auditing SPF (Sender Policy Framework) — we will review and optimize your SPF settings to ensure your emails are recognized as legitimate and improve deliverability. Most of you already have SPF in place, working well for things like Mailchimp and so forth, but requirements change, and if you've changed accounting systems, newsletter systems, job systems, or CRMs, SPF often needs to change too

These jobs will vary per client in terms of the amount of time it takes, depending on the number of domains you have, whether or not we have access to your domain for changes, and what we find as we start to look at your mail flows.

If you DON'T want us to do this, please let us know. It won't be 4 hours of work in one hit — some may take less time, some a little more — but over time everyone does need to look at this stuff for their systems to keep working well, and we can't in good conscience do nothing as we are seeing a lot more mail getting blocked and spammed when people do not have these correct settings in place.

It's possible we may need to talk to you and/or your website/ERP/CRM providers at the time these works are done.

Why All This Matters

SPF, DKIM and DMARC help authenticate mail sent using your domains, which improves deliverability and makes your domain harder to impersonate. They are part of a wider approach that also considers account access, message handling and staff reporting — they do not, on their own, protect you from every phishing attack, particularly one sent from a genuine compromised mailbox somewhere else.

Google's recent enforcement of stricter DMARC policies underscores the necessity of these measures. Businesses that do not comply with these authentication standards are seeing an increase in email rejections, directly impacting their operations and reputation.

Any questions, feel free to give us a call.

Cheers, Ashley Kirk