Own the domain yourself
The domain is the most important asset in this list and the one most often held by someone else. If your developer or agency registered it in their account, transfer it now, while everyone is friendly.
Registrant details in your company name, billing on your card, auto-renew on. Expired domains are recoverable and expensive; hijacked ones sometimes are not.
Hosting and email are separate concerns
They arrive bundled and they are different services with different requirements. Website hosting needs uptime and speed; email needs deliverability and reliability.
Bundled hosting email is a common cause of deliverability problems. For a business that depends on email reaching customers, a dedicated provider is usually worth the modest cost.
Why your email lands in spam
Almost always because of three DNS records that are missing or wrong. They tell receiving servers that mail claiming to be from your domain is genuinely from you.
- SPF — which servers are allowed to send as your domain. One record, listing every service you send through.
- DKIM — a signature proving the message was not altered and came from you.
- DMARC — what receivers should do when the first two fail, and where to send reports.
Every service that sends on your behalf — your website, your CRM, your invoicing software — needs including. A form notification sent from an unauthorised server is exactly the mail that disappears.
The failure nobody sees
Mail sent from an address that does not exist as a real mailbox is frequently dropped silently. No bounce, no error, nothing in spam — because there is no real sender for the bounce to return to.
If your website sends notifications from a no-reply address, make sure that address is a real mailbox on your domain and that the sending server is authorised to use it.
A short checklist
- Domain registered to your company, auto-renew on, contact details current
- Registrar account access held by someone still at the business
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured and tested
- Every sending service included in SPF
- A monitored mailbox receiving DMARC reports
- DNS managed somewhere you can access without asking anyone