every time you hit send, Gmail and Outlook run your email through 4 invisible checkpoints before it reaches the recipient's inbox.
fail any one of them and your email gets routed to spam, promotions, or silently throttled. you'll never get a notification. your sending tool will still say "delivered." but your prospect never sees it.
this is what's actually happening behind the scenes.
this is the identity check. the email provider is asking: "is this sender who they claim to be?"
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) tells receiving servers which IP addresses are authorised to send email from your domain.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) attaches a cryptographic signature to your emails so the receiver can verify they weren't tampered with in transit.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) tells receiving servers what to do when SPF or DKIM fail, and sends you reports about it.
if any of these are missing or misconfigured, you're flagged before the recipient even has a chance to open your email.
p=none for monitoring, move to p=quarantine once clean)even with perfect authentication, the provider checks your reputation.
this includes: