Domain names, DNS and professional email

Your domain must belong to you

It is the first thing I check when taking over a site. Many shops run on a domain registered in the name of the agency that built it, or of the previous developer. While things go well, nobody notices. The day the relationship ends — or simply the day that person becomes unreachable — the domain becomes a hostage, and a lost domain takes the search rankings, the email and the customers’ trust with it.

The domain holder must be the company or person running the shop. Not the contractor. That applies to me as much as to anyone: I can manage your domain, I am never its holder.

Checking takes two minutes: a WHOIS lookup on your domain shows the declared holder. If the name shown is not yours — and it is not simply registrar privacy protection — that is the first thing to sort out, before any other technical discussion.

Order emails that never arrive

This is the most common reason people call about domains, and the cause is almost always in the DNS zone. A shop sending order confirmations from its own server, without the domain authorising that server to speak on its behalf, sees its messages filed as spam or silently refused.

Three records govern this, and they complement one another:

• SPF declares which servers may send mail for your domain. There must be exactly one SPF record: two separate records invalidate the whole thing, a very common mistake when a sending service is added without looking at what already exists.
• DKIM signs each message with a key whose public part is published in DNS. The recipient verifies the message was not altered in transit.
• DMARC tells the recipient what to do when SPF and DKIM fail, and allows you to receive reports. It is what turns two technical settings into a readable policy.

Since 2024, the major mailbox providers require these records from senders operating at volume, and the requirements keep tightening. A shop sending confirmations, invoices and reminders sends at volume.