Why important emails never arrive: SPF, DKIM and DMARC in order

“The client says they sent the email, we never got it.” “Our proposals land in the recipient’s spam.” The two most common email complaints among Google Workspace users, and in both cases the culprit is usually not Gmail. It is DNS records that were never finished.

The three records that decide everything

• SPF declares which servers may send mail for your domain. One TXT record containing include:_spf.google.com. Critically: a domain may have only one SPF record. Two SPF records are as bad as none.
• DKIM is a cryptographic signature proving the message was not altered in transit. Google does not enable it automatically. Generate it in the Admin console (Apps, Google Workspace, Gmail, Authenticate email), then add it to DNS. This is the single most skipped step.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do with mail that fails the checks. Start with p=none to collect reports, move to quarantine or reject only after.

Do not trust diagnostic tools alone

Toolbox checkers show warnings when everything is fine and vice versa. The reliable test is simple: send a message from your domain to an account on another service, open it, view the original. You want three lines saying PASS: SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Any FAIL or NONE and you have found the problem.

Incoming mail that never arrives

• Contact forms on your website sending mail with the customer’s address as the sender. Google treats that as spoofing. The form must send from your domain with the customer in Reply-To.
• Overzealous Compliance or Content rules in the Admin console, set up once and forgotten.
• A stale MX record still pointing at the previous mail server.

The Admin console’s Email Log Search shows whether a message reached Google at all and what happened next. Use it first, not last.

And no, Outlook is not the fix

When mail misbehaves, someone always suggests switching clients. If the root cause is DNS, the client changes nothing. Authentication is part of every Workspace setup we do, and a deliverability test is included in our free audit. If it is urgent, call +371 22 30 50 90.