I’m a third of the way there how about you?
If you ever send emails to your clients or customers this is important. Do you know what SPF, DKIM and DMARC mean? Never heard of them or you have and are avoiding the subject?
Tomorrow is the 1st of February so it’s deadline day for action!
To explain simply the clever people (Google, Yahoo etc) who help our emails get from us to our clients are ramping up their efforts to protect us all from the dreaded spam*.
Just so you know, not that it’s important, the meanings…
SPF – Sender Policy Framework
DKIM – Domain Keys Identified Mail
DMARC – Domain Based Authentication, Reporting and Confirmation
From tomorrow you need to use your own domain to send emails and set-up the SPF, DKIM and DMARC in the back-end to prove that emails are coming from you aka your business and just you.
“What is a domain?” I hear you say it is the address for your website, like your home address it is unique to your business. Mine is Just Ask Janice . Today but without the spaces I’ve added. The .Today part, like co.uk and .com, is what’s called a top-level domain and you can choose from 100s of them. Some are just for countries or government organisations like gov.uk
Now I’m not claiming to be an expert in this, it has honestly taken me a while to get my head round the new email settings. Once I** sat down to do this it took about 15 minutes to do the SPF and DKIM per domain. Yes, I have many domains.
The DMARC will also be done but isn’t quite as easy to set up, mainly as the instructions were ‘get a professional to do it’. Not helpful at all – I literally have an 30+ year IT Professional living in my house (aka the husband) all we need are the steps to get this done. Fortunately I’ve found better instructions now we just need to collate diaries to get this done.
I digress. Back to the plot…
Do check the instructions, or the emails you got months ago, from your emails sending service. That may be MailerLite, MailChimp or another.
You will need to do this whether you’re a charity, CIC, a small or large business, a church or another organisation. Send one email or many get it done as soon as you can. The changes are not a gradual roll out and will affect you if it’s not done.
You might wonder why am I telling you about this new email set-up when I’m not offering this as a service? It’s because it’s just the nice thing to do. As I’m not an expert on how to do this I won’t offer a service I’m not 100% confidant I can do.
Don’t have a domain name? Now is the time to get one – I can help with this. You don’t have to use it for a website, if you don’t want to, you can just use the domain name for your email set-up. Make it unique, make it align with your business name, make it yours.
I can get a domain name for you. I can set up MailerLite or MailChimp for you. I can build a website for you. These I 100% can do. There are so many other things I can do too all you have to do is Just Ask Janice Today Let’s Chat about how I can help you.
Now you’ve got through all of that it’s time to go and treat yourself to a hot chocolate. It absolutely must be hot chocolate (unless you have allergies) as it is National Hot Chocolate Day today. My beverage of choice on a daily basis. Cheers!
*Not the kind in the tin that some people enjoy eating. I would avoid flying cans of spam though that would be painful and not keep the doctor away unlike apples.
**Husband and I mainly as he has the domain set-up on his computer, for historic reasons, and I have the email set up on mine. It’s a longish story.