Do you know whether your e-mails reach the customer?

Do you know whether your e-mails reach the customer? Not “sent”. Delivered. Between the two sits a mechanism most companies have never heard of: the recipient’s mail server looks up the internet’s directory to check whether your server is allowed to send on behalf of your company at all. If the entry is wrong, the mail lands in spam or never arrives.

The most common fault is inconspicuous: one entry points at a second entry that does not exist. For strict recipients that means: error, rejected. For lenient ones: waved through. Which is why nobody notices for a long time — until a mail to a strictly checking server comes back with an error.

The repair is usually a single line in the directory. Prevention is just as short: after every change to these entries, check whether each reference actually points at something. Two minutes.

Because a mail that never arrives produces no error on your side. Only silence at the customer’s end. And silence does not stand out in a working day.

When did someone last check whether your company is allowed to send?

Why nobody notices for so long

The fault has a treacherous property: it only shows with recipients that check strictly. All others deliver the mail anyway. In your own outbox every mail looks the same — «sent». Whether it arrived in the customer’s inbox, in spam or not at all is written nowhere there.

It often only shows when a single mail comes back with an error — and only the other server’s message names the reason.

Three questions every company with its own domain can ask

1. Is your server allowed to send? The internet’s directory of names holds a list of the servers that may send mail in the name of your domain. If that list points to further lists, each of them has to exist — a single reference to nothing, and the whole list counts as an error.
2. Are your mails signed? A digital signature lets the recipient check whether the mail was changed on the way and really comes from you.
3. What should the recipient do when a check fails? You define that yourself too — and you can have reports sent to you about who sends in your name.

If you cannot answer these three questions, you do not have to look them up yourself. But somebody should do it for the company once, and again after every change.

Operating instead of owning

Your own mail server belongs to you, with all the advantages. In return the duty to maintain and check such entries belongs to you as well. This is the part of an AI-run back office nobody sees as long as it works — and it makes sure every approved draft actually arrives: Your back office, run by AI.