If auth passes and you're still in spam, stop looking at DNS

Most asked question I get, and the answer is almost never the DNS.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC prove the mail came from you and wasn't spoofed. That's the whole job. They get you past the forgery check at the door. They say nothing about whether Google actually wants to hear from you.

What decides placement is reputation and list quality, mostly. A domain registered six weeks ago has no sending history, and no history gets treated as guilty until it earns otherwise. There's no record you can add to skip that part.

The list is where I'd look first though. Scraped or old data carries dead addresses and traps, and one trap can take you from fine to poisoned inside a day. B2B data goes off fast because people change jobs constantly, so a list you verified three months ago isn't a verified list, it's a historical document.

Two specific things worth checking before you touch a DNS record.

Catch-all domains. Somewhere between a fifth and half of B2B domains accept mail to any address, so your verifier returns valid and it bounces anyway. If you're not running a separate catch-all check you genuinely don't know your bounce rate until you've already sent.

Per inbox volume. 30 to 50 a day is plenty for cold, and your warmup sends count toward that number. Most people forget the second half of that sentence and then wonder why a "slow" ramp isn't working.

And if you're running cold from your main company domain, stop today. Burn it and your invoices go to spam next to your outreach. Use domains you don't mind losing.

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u/Away_Law_4388 — 8 days ago
▲ 5 r/DMARC+1 crossposts

The SPF 10 lookup limit fails silently and that's how it gets you

Twice this year I've been handed a "deliverability is broken" account where the actual problem was the SPF lookup count. Posting it because almost nobody checks this one.

SPF gets 10 DNS lookups. Not 10 include statements, 10 lookups, and each include can chain into more of its own. Sending tool, CRM, warmup service, helpdesk, and you're over without having added anything that looks excessive. Go over and SPF returns permerror, which most receivers treat as a fail. Your checker still shows green, because most checkers only tell you the record parses.

Related thing people miss: there are three domains accumulating reputation, not one. The From domain, the DKIM signing domain, and the Return-Path that bounces come back to. Everyone sets up From and forgets the other two. If you're on a sending platform your Return-Path is often their shared domain, so you inherit whatever their other customers did that week. Nothing you can fix in your own DNS.

And alignment dies quietly on migrations. I watched a platform move break DMARC alignment and nobody caught it for about four months, because nothing bounces when alignment fails. Placement just sags and everyone blames the copy.

So count your lookups with something that resolves recursively instead of counting includes, check all three domains rather than just From, and re-check every time you swap a tool in the chain. That last one is the one people skip.

I wrote the longer version of this up here if it's useful: https://thegtmmotion.substack.com/p/you-set-up-spf-dkim-and-dmarc-and

u/Away_Law_4388 — 7 days ago