If people keep telling you “it went to my junk”, the problem usually isn’t what you wrote. It’s that the receiving mail server can’t prove the email really came from your club. Gmail, Outlook and the rest now expect three records in your domain’s DNS to prove it. Many club domains have none of them, or have them half-right.
SPF: who is allowed to send
SPF is a single line in your DNS listing the services allowed to send email as your domain: your mailbox provider, your newsletter tool, the thing that sends your website’s form notifications. Mail from anywhere else looks suspicious.
The classic mistake is forgetting one. Add your mailbox provider, forget the newsletter tool, and every newsletter now fails the check. List every service that sends as your domain before writing the record — and there must only ever be one SPF record.
DKIM: a signature on every message
DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to each email, and publishes the matching public key in your DNS. The receiving server checks the signature, which proves the message wasn’t forged or altered on the way. Your provider gives you the records; they just need adding exactly as given.
DMARC: what to do when checks fail
DMARC tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF and DKIM — nothing, quarantine it, or reject it — and where to send reports. Start gently (p=none), read the reports to find senders you forgot, then tighten it.
The club-specific traps
- Personal addresses for club business. When the secretary uses their own Gmail, the club can’t protect or keep that mail. Use role addresses on the club’s domain — secretary@, tickets@, commercial@ — so they survive a change of committee.
- Website forms sending “as” the visitor. A form that sends an email pretending to be from the fan’s address will fail every check. Send from your own domain through a proper transactional service and set the fan’s address as the Reply-To.
- Moving hosts and losing records. Changing where your website or domain lives can quietly drop the DKIM records. Check them after any move.
How to check yours
Send an email to a Gmail address, open it, and choose “Show original”. You want to see PASS next to SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If any say FAIL or are missing, that’s your answer — and it’s usually a half-hour fix.