Your Emails May Not be Reaching Clients, and How to Fix It

You know that moment when you set up your email on your phone or computer – your branded email that is on your custom business domain – and it just asks for your email and password? You type it in, everything connects, and you figure you’re good to go. Easy peasy, right?

What actually happened is your device guessed the rest—like your incoming and outgoing server settings—and that’s where the problems begin.

It used to be that you always had to enter all of that info manually, and seems so easy now that you don’t. The url, the port numbers (did you use the right ones?), so you need SSLTLS or the other stuff? So much easier to just enter the password and let it do the heavy lifting, right?

When your device does the setup for you, it often defaults to using the platform’s mail server (like Outlook, AT&T, or Apple Mail). When it decides to use it’s own servers, and not your server (your domain), that means your email is getting sent through a shared server that’s also being used by thousands and thousands of other people—some of whom might be (face it, some definitely are) sending spam.

Those spammer cause the shared server to take a reputation hit, and your email gets lumped in with them. It’s guilt by association.

When you send through your own domain’s server, with the right setup (yes, that means entering all that manual stuff which will take you several minutes), you’re relying primarily on your own sending reputation. And if you’re not sending spam, you’re in a much, much better spot long-term.

Adding a few extra minutes one time on the initial setup can save you tons of headaches down the road.

When Email Stops Working Quietly

Your email looks like it sent. No error message. No bounce-back. But the person you sent it to never got it. Or it went straight to spam and they didn’t check there.

This kind of silent failure is common when your domain settings aren’t configured correctly or you’re unknowingly sending from someone else’s infrastructure. You can’t fix a problem you don’t even know is happening—until clients stop responding.

What’s Really Happening Behind the Scenes

Most email apps are trying to make things easy. So when you don’t fill in the full outgoing server info, they take their best guess. But “easy” isn’t always correct.

Instead of using your domain (like [email protected] via mail.yourdomain.com), it may route your email through Outlook’s shared server, AT&T’s mail system, or whatever app you’re using on your computer or mobile phone.

To spam filters and receiving mail servers, this looks suspicious. Especially if your domain says mail should come from somewhere else.

That’s when messages get flagged, filtered, or outright rejected.

The Tech You Actually Need (In Plain English)

There are some settings that all businesses need to ensure are properly reflected in their DNS records as the first step is making sure your email deliverability is strong. Here’s what keeps your emails from getting flagged:

SPF
This record tells the world which servers are allowed to send mail on your behalf. Think of it like a bouncer with a list of approved names. If the sending server isn’t on the list, it gets rejected at the door.

DKIM
This adds a digital signature to your emails. It proves the message really came from you and hasn’t been altered.

DMARC
This gives mail servers instructions on what to do when something doesn’t match. Should they reject the message? Quarantine it? Let it slide? DMARC tells them.

These three email authentication pieces, which are set up in your DNS settings, work together to authenticate your messages and protect your domain’s reputation. Without them, you’re invisible—or worse, treated like a threat.

Why IMAP Matters

Then, setting up your account on your devices properly is your next step.

A lot of people don’t think twice about how their email is set up as long as they can read and send messages. But whether to choose POP3 or IMAP is an important consideration.

IMAP is always what I recommend because it syncs emails across all devices. If you choose POP3 and download an email to your desktop, it’s no longer available on your phone. And vice versa.

But IMAP does more than just sync your email across devices.

It gives you access to the proper mail server settings, so you can send messages through your actual domain and not some third-party fallback. That’s what helps your emails pass authentication and reach the inbox instead of the junk folder.

A Real-World Example

A similar issue happened to two of my clients within the past couple of weeks. Both had set up email on their phone by simply entering their email address and password and letting their app handle the rest.

Neither realized that meant they were sending through other servers (in this case, one Outlook and one AT&T).

To them, it looked like everything was working … until they started getting rejected email messages. Those look something like this:

[email protected]
host smtp.mailserver.example [123.45.67.89]
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
550 XYZ123456 – [email protected] message rejected AUP#SNDR

Whenever I see that AUP@SNDR I immediately know it means the sender ended up on a spam list. In their case, the IP address it gave was indeed on one of the spam lists. However, we realized that’s not THEIR IP address. So the next step was figuring out why it was sending via a different IP address than expected. (That IP address should be the same one they see in their web hosting or is shown in the first record of their DNS settings, and it wasn’t).

Once we set them up with the correct IMAP and SMTP settings, meaning deleting the existing email account and re-adding it and forcing it to allow us to enter the advanced settings (all the incoming and outgoing server info), and made sure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC were configured correctly, deliverability issues disappeared.

How to Check If You’re Set Up Right

Not sure if your emails are being delivered the way they should? Here’s a quick self-check:

• Are you sending email through your own domain’s mail server (like mail.yourdomain.com), or letting your phone or desktop app default to something generic like Outlook’s or AT&T’s servers?
• Do you have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly set up in your DNS?
• Have you tested your email deliverability lately?
• Are replies going quiet, or landing in junk folders?
• Do your email headers show your domain as the sender, or is something else sneaking in?
• Have you run your email addressthrough tools like MXToolbox to check for blacklist issues?
• Have you sent a test message to [email protected] and reviewed the report it sends back?

If you’re unsure on any of the above, schedule a quick appointment and we’ll walk through it together.

Also check out:

• Why Your Email Signature Could Be Hurting Your Business (And How to Fix It)
• Email Marketing Success Checklist

Don’t let the tech quietly sabotage your communication. Let’s fix it.