I want email on my company domain — how do I start? — answered by Engineer Saeed Baatiah
You need a domain (your company name) and a mail service connected to it. The step everyone skips and which then lands their mail in the spam folder is configuring the three authentication records: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Without those three your mail will reach your customers’ junk folder, and your domain can be spoofed in phishing messages. Set up once, and the problem is solved permanently.
The three records are not technical trivia but what decides whether your mail arrives or lands in junk: SPF declares which servers may send as your domain, DKIM adds a signature proving the message was not altered, and DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with mail failing either. Without all three your mail reaches your customers’ spam folder — a silent failure nobody tells you about.
And the second risk of their absence is worse than the first: a domain without DMARC can be spoofed. Anyone can send a message appearing to come from your address to your customers requesting a payment transfer, and it passes checks because you never set a policy. This genuinely happens in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and configuring the records once ends it.
And a practical note before cutover: do not migrate company mail on a busy working day, and do not cancel the old service before confirming the new one both receives and sends. Keep a copy of the old mailbox before migrating — migrations between mail services usually succeed but not without exceptions, and one copy turns an exception from a disaster into an inconvenience.
- SPF, DKIM, DMARC — without them your mail lands in junk
- A domain without DMARC can be spoofed to defraud your customers
- Do not cancel the old service before confirming send and receive
- Keep a copy of the old mailbox before migrating