Confusing at first, these abbreviations are going to play a very important role in ensuring your well crafted email lands in your leads inbox!
So let’s take a quick dive into what these actually are and why you need to bother about them. If you get all the below 4 done right, you drastically improve your chance of landing in your leads main inbox.
DKIM
This is an authentication method that lets Email Service Providers know if the email is actually associated to the domain.
AKA no random person can send an email on behalf of a facebook employee or [email protected]
SPF
Each email is given a “Made in” tag, similar to groceries you buy. Lets say you only buy cheese from farms in New Zealand.
Next time you buy a cheese block you’d look up to see if the farm it’s made in, is from New Zealand, and if not you’d reject it.
Similarly so, this policy is used by the receiving email provider to look at the “Made in IP address” to see if it was actually made by facebook.com’s IP (for.eg) and not some other IP.
DMARC
This policy uses both DKIM and SPF listed above to decide whether the received email should land up in junk or be straight out rejected.
It basically lets every email service provider know that the email you’ve sent is legitimate and sent by you.
MX Records
In short, these records tell the internet which server is responsible for accepting emails when emails are sent to your domain. Hence the name Mail Exchange Servers
Here’s how you can set each of them up:
Without MX records you won’t be able receive or even send emails. This part is fundamental.