One of the first things you should do is set up standard email authentication methods for your sending domain: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These may sound technical, but they are essentially tools that prove to mailbox providers that you are who you say you are as a sender. Enabling them is critical to deliverability: many email providers will deflect or reject unauthenticated emails because they may be phishing or spam.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework): SPF lets you specify which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. You do this by adding an SPF record to your domain’s DNS. When an email arrives claiming to be from your domain, the receiving server checks that DNS record to see if the sending server’s IP is listed. If it is, the email passes SPF. This prevents spammers from spoofing your domain in their emails.
How it helps deliverability: By publishing an SPF record, you’re telling the world “these servers are legitimate [url=https://lastdatabase.com/automotive-mailing-list /]automotive mailing list[url] senders for my domain.” It reduces the chance of your domain being used for spoofing, which means recipients trust your email more. (Rogue servers won’t pass SPF, and those fake emails can be filtered out, protecting your brand.) Simply put, SPF is a critical layer of trust and one of the “must-follow” protocols for good deliverability.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM adds a digital signature to every email you send, which recipients can verify to ensure that the message has not been tampered with and actually came from your domain. You generate a pair of cryptographic keys (one private, one public).
Your sending mail server uses the private key to sign the header of every outgoing email. Recipients use your public key (published via DNS) to verify that the signature is valid. If the signature is verified, it confirms that the email content has not been tampered with and was authorized by your domain.