Insights · 5 minutes
Email Deliverability
Password resets, spam folders, domain trust, and why important website emails should never look suspicious to inbox providers.
A missing password reset is a trust problem
When password reset emails never arrive, users do not diagnose DNS records. They decide the site is broken. If the message lands in spam, the result is not much better.
Transactional emails should be treated like infrastructure, not decoration. They need a reliable sender, clear authentication, and monitoring when something changes.
Do not teach inboxes to distrust you
A site can make legitimate mail look suspicious by sending from the wrong domain, skipping authentication, mixing marketing and transactional traffic, or using vague message content.
The goal is not to mark everything as safe and hope. The goal is to send mail in a way that is actually trustworthy.
The fix is usually operational
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC matter, but deliverability is also about process: who owns the sending domain, what service sends each type of email, and how failures are discovered.
A reliable website should have a clear path for contact forms, password resets, receipts, and internal notifications.
Check your own domain, right now
Reading about SPF and DMARC is one thing. Seeing your own domain graded is another. This is the same check we run at the start of every audit — type your organization's domain and it runs live, right here on the page.
Can a stranger send email in your organization's name?
A "please renew your membership" note to your members. A payment request to your finance team, signed with your director's name. If your domain isn't locked down, a stranger can send both — and to the person receiving them, they look completely real. See where yours stands. Free, about three seconds, nothing stored.
The technical specifics (for your IT contact)
This is one of roughly forty things a full Website Operations Audit checks — performance, accessibility, security, and more. In plain English, with none of the jargon above.
Get the full picture →How this is built: the check runs on our own server — a few DNS lookups against your domain's published records, graded the way inbox providers actually read them. Nothing is stored, and there's no third-party service involved. This page is the product demo: we build tools like this into our clients' sites too.