Improve Your Email Deliverability: The How-to Guide on SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for Accountants
Did you know that you can have a great email delivery rate but still experience deliverability issues? For accountants and accounting firms, ensuring that important client communications, tax updates, and newsletters actually reach your clients’ inboxes is essential for maintaining trust and professionalism.
What?!
The reason is that these two metrics are different. Your email delivery rate is the percentage of your emails that are received by your recipients’ mail servers. However, delivery doesn’t guarantee that the email won’t end up in a spam folder. That’s where email deliverability comes in—ensuring your carefully crafted email actually lands in the inbox.
In 2024 all major email client providers made these records crucial for delivery – more on this in a moment. In most cases if you don’t have authentication, or it’s configured incorrectly, you will have issues with delivery, deliverability or both!
If you think you may have email deliverability issues, it may be due to missing or incorrect SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. These three authentication mechanisms help protect your emails from being marked as spam or rejected altogether. Let’s break them down.
Why This Matters for Accountants
As an accountant, your clients rely on your emails for crucial information like tax deadlines, compliance updates, financial reports, and industry insights. If your emails don’t reach them, it can cause confusion, missed deadlines, and damage your firm’s reputation. Setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC ensures that your emails are trusted, professional, and secure.
What is SPF?
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a security mechanism designed to prevent spammers from sending emails from your domain.
Adding an SPF record to your domain’s DNS (Domain Name System) helps recipients’ mail servers verify that emails claiming to be from your domain are genuinely from an authorized sender. This improves deliverability by:
- Preventing spammers from spoofing your domain.
- Ensuring your emails pass authentication checks, reducing the risk of being marked as spam.
- Meeting the latest authentication requirements from major email providers.
What is DKIM?
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) provides an additional way to prove to recipients that your email is legitimate and has not been tampered with during transmission. DKIM works by adding a cryptographic signature to your emails:
- A private key is used to generate a unique signature in your email header.
- A public key is published in your DNS records so recipients’ mail servers can verify the signature.
Setting up DKIM ensures that your emails maintain integrity and credibility, which is especially important when sending confidential financial updates to clients.
What is DMARC?
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is a policy layer that builds on SPF and DKIM. It allows you to specify how email providers should handle emails that fail authentication checks.
A DMARC record:
- Defines whether unauthenticated emails should be rejected, quarantined, or allowed.
- Helps prevent phishing attacks and email spoofing.
- Provides reporting on email authentication results, helping you monitor and adjust your email security settings.
Latest Updates from Major Email Providers
As of 2024, major email providers such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have implemented stricter email authentication requirements:
- Google: Requires bulk senders (5,000+ emails per day) to have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured. Emails must pass DMARC alignment (the domain in the ‘From’ header must match the domain authenticated by SPF or DKIM). A one-click unsubscribe feature is also required for marketing emails.
- Yahoo: Enforces similar authentication standards, requiring SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to ensure deliverability and combat spoofing.
- Microsoft: Microsoft operates its independent receivers based on organisation settings, in our experience most do require SPF and DKIM. Microsoft itself strongly recommends implementing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to improve email security and deliverability.
How to Set Up SPF/DKIM with BOMA
BOMA makes it easy for accountants to implement these email authentication protocols. Follow these steps to ensure your domain is correctly configured:
- Send your domain name to support@bomamarketing.com. For example, if you send emails from John@acmeaccounting.com, your domain name is acmeaccounting.com.
- BOMA will generate and send your DKIM and standard SPF records for this domain.
- BOMA will provide step-by-step technical support to help you set up the records on your domain.
- Once setup is complete, reply to the support ticket to notify BOMA.
- BOMA will test and confirm that your authentication records are working correctly.
- BOMA will notify you when the process is complete or provide any necessary adjustments.
Secure and Professional Email Communication for Accountants
As an accountant, your email communications are critical for client relationships and business operations. Implementing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC not only aligns with the latest requirements from major email providers but also significantly improves your email deliverability, ensuring your messages reach your clients’ inboxes. Need help? Reach out to support@bomamarketing.com today!