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Email Deliverability for Small Stores: A Checklist

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Few things frustrate a store owner more than a customer who says the order confirmation never arrived. Often the email was sent and quietly filed under spam. Inbox providers have become stricter about who they trust, so a few small settings on your domain now matter a great deal. This checklist explains them in plain language and shows what to ask your email provider or developer to confirm.

The three records that prove you are you

Think of these as identity checks that receiving mail servers run on every message that claims to come from your domain.

  • SPF lists which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain.
  • DKIM adds a digital signature, so the receiver can confirm the message really came from your domain and was not altered on the way.
  • DMARC tells receivers what to do when a message fails those checks, and sends you reports about who is using your domain.

These are DNS records, which are set at whoever manages your domain name. Your email or newsletter tool normally gives you the exact values to paste in. Several tools also let you check the status from their settings page.

What Google expects

Google’s published sender guidelines define a bulk sender as one sending close to 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail addresses in a day. Once you cross that line, Google treats you as a bulk sender from then on. For those senders, Google requires SPF and DKIM, plus a DMARC record with at least the monitoring-only policy, and the From domain must line up with one of the other two. Marketing messages need one-click unsubscribe, and Google asks senders to honour requests within 48 hours. Transactional messages such as password resets and order confirmations are not covered by the unsubscribe rule.

Even a small shop that sits far below that volume benefits from the same setup. Postmark’s guidance recommends SPF, DKIM and DMARC for any sending domain.

Start DMARC in monitoring mode

Postmark’s DMARC guide describes a gentle path:

  1. Publish a DMARC record with the policy set to none, which only monitors. It includes an address where summary reports are delivered, so use one you read.
  2. Review the reports when they arrive. They show every system sending mail on behalf of your domain and whether each passes the checks. A free reader tool makes the raw files far easier to follow.
  3. Make sure every legitimate sender passes: your email provider, newsletter tool, helpdesk and so on.
  4. Only after everything passes consistently, consider moving to quarantine and then reject, ramping up gradually.
  5. Keep reading the reports afterwards, because changes to DNS or to your sending tools can break good mail.

Do not rush this. Jumping straight to a strict policy can block your own legitimate email.

Keep your complaint rate low

Google asks senders to keep the user-reported spam rate below 0.1% and never to reach 0.3%. Those figures are calculated daily and viewable in Google’s Postmaster Tools. The practical ways to stay low are not mysterious:

  • Email only people who asked to hear from you.
  • Make unsubscribing easy and obvious. A simple exit costs you less than a spam complaint.
  • Remove addresses that bounce.
  • Send at a steady pace rather than rare, huge bursts.

Separate order emails from marketing

Postmark suggests keeping transactional messages apart from promotional ones, for example on a different subdomain or sending stream, so that a poorly received campaign does not drag down order confirmations. For those transactional messages, their guide adds a few good habits:

  • Use a recognisable store name in the From field, not a generic no-reply label.
  • Keep subject lines short, around fifty characters or fewer, and put the key fact first.
  • Offer a plain-text version alongside the designed one.
  • Route replies to an inbox someone actually reads.
  • Give exact dates and times rather than words like today, particularly for links that expire.
  • Test on a phone.

A quick self-test

  1. Send a test order confirmation to a personal Gmail address and to one other provider.
  2. Check whether each arrives in the inbox, the promotions tab or spam.
  3. Open the message details and look for passes on SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
  4. Click your own unsubscribe link in a newsletter test and confirm it works.
  5. Repeat after any change of email tool, domain host or store platform.

When it is time to call a developer

Ask for help when DNS records conflict, when a domain has several tools sending on its behalf, when order emails fail to send at all, or when your platform’s notification templates need rebuilding. Because the records live in your domain settings and can affect all of your company email, it is wise to have someone experienced review changes. Our services page outlines how we can help, and if the emails themselves need a refresh, see our themes for matching storefront designs.

Further reading

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