◈Deliverability

It answers a single question: Do your mails arrive?

To do so, Aurora Hive Sales reads the real values of your domain from the DNS and recalculates them, instead of ticking a box. Alongside this are two further things that determine your sender reputation: bounces and proof of consent.

Enlarge

An SPF record sits in the DNS zone of your domain and states which servers are allowed to send mail on your behalf.

Yes, you need one. If it is missing, or the sending server is not listed, many recipients classify the mail as suspicious — without any error message to you. You only notice it from replies that never come.

Probably because of the ten-lookup limit. When evaluated, an SPF record may trigger at most ten further DNS lookups. Beyond that, receiving servers discard the entire record — it looks complete and does not work.

This is caused by chains of references to other providers (newsletter service, mail provider, shop system, ticket system, each with its own reference). Aurora Hive Sales counts along for you and tells you when the limit has been exceeded.

The way out is not to collect more references but to remove the ones you no longer need — every discontinued service still listed in the SPF costs a lookup.

A cryptographic signature on every outgoing mail. Using a public key stored in your DNS zone, the recipient checks whether the message stayed unchanged in transit and really comes from your organisation.

SPF says: This server may send on my behalf. DKIM says: This message is genuine. Both together are the foundation; each on its own only does half the job.

DMARC is your instruction to recipients on what should happen to mails that fail SPF and DKIM — ignore, quarantine, reject. On top of that come reports on who is sending in your name.

The usual route in three steps:

1. Start with “monitor only” and an address for the reports.
2. For a few weeks, read along to see who is sending in your name — forgotten services almost always turn up.
3. Only then tighten things: quarantine, later reject.

Setting it straight to “reject” before SPF and DKIM are clean for all your sending routes is the most reliable way to block your own invoice mail.

With the provider that manages your domain — the same place where the address of your website is stored. Not in Aurora Hive Sales: Aurora Hive Sales only reads the values and checks them.

Depending on the provider, it takes minutes to hours before a change is known everywhere. So do not check immediately after saving, but again the next day, and use “Check again” in Aurora Hive Sales for this rather than your gut feeling.

Whoever looks after your website or registered your domain. A short, precise mail is enough to commission it — Aurora Hive Sales shows the values to be set word for word, so you can pass them on unchanged.

State explicitly that these are TXT records and that an existing SPF record must be extended, not replaced. A second SPF record alongside the first makes both invalid — that is the most common mistake when third parties implement it.

Bounces are mails that the recipient’s server rejects. Aurora Hive Sales evaluates them from the inbox and blocks the addresses concerned.

Why this matters: anyone who keeps writing to undeliverable addresses loses their sender reputation — measurably and without an error message. Mail providers treat repeated delivery attempts to non-existent addresses as a sign of a bought or neglected list.

A distinction is made between hard (the address does not exist — permanent) and soft (temporary, for example a full mailbox — retried).

Yes, and there is an important difference here:

• A block is only a technical finding. It can be lifted.
• An unsubscribe is a declaration of intent. It cannot be reversed.

Releasing only makes sense once the address has been corrected. Releasing an unchanged address only means producing the same bounce again — and damaging your sender reputation a second time.

Article 7 of the General Data Protection Regulation requires that you can prove consent — not merely that it is recorded in the system.

For this, Aurora Hive Sales records: time, origin, IP address and the wording that appeared on the screen at the time. The last item in that list is the one most systems forget: consent without the text that was agreed to is worth little in a dispute, because the text may have changed since.

That is exactly what you would present in a dispute.

A new address has no reputation — neither good nor bad. It first has to build one up, and that only happens slowly.

In practice:

1. DNS records first, then the first mail. Not the other way round.
2. Start small. Aurora Hive Sales throttles new addresses of its own accord; only raise the limit once delivery has been stable for weeks.
3. Start with the best addresses — existing customers whom you know and who reply. Replies are the strongest positive signal.
4. No bought lists in the first few weeks. That is when the damage is greatest.

The findings in Aurora Hive Sales cover your own DNS records — they do not tell you whether an external blocklist lists your domain or your server address.

Signs that something fundamental is wrong: bounces for all recipients instead of individual ones, error messages in the bounce text pointing to a block, or a sudden slump even though nothing has changed in the content.

If you are at this point, Aurora Hive Sales cannot help; the operator of your mail server can: they see the rejections word for word.

Once SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place, content is the next lever. What measurably helps:

• Short and personal rather than designed and promotional.
• Few links. A mail with twelve links looks like a newsletter, even if it is not one.
• No mail consisting only of an image. That is a classic spam feature.
• Small attachments or none at all. A link is almost always better for a first contact.
• An honest subject line. Anything that looks like “Re:” or “Urgent” without being so is recognised by filters and does lasting harm.

1. SPF — the simplest, with the biggest immediate effect.
2. DKIM — needs a key and a little more manual work.
3. DMARC, initially monitoring only.

Only once SPF and DKIM are clean for all your sending routes do you tighten DMARC. This order matters: the other way round, you lock out your own mails before you even know which routes exist.

An entry in the DNS zone of your domain that simply contains text. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all three such entries — that is why your provider’s instructions talk about a “TXT record”.

What you specify: a name (for SPF this is the domain itself, for DMARC a fixed prefix) and the value that Aurora Hive Sales shows you word for word. Copy the value unchanged; an extra space at the beginning is enough to stop it working.

Every route through which mail goes out in your name must be listed in SPF and, if possible, signed — otherwise exactly this route fails as soon as DMARC takes effect.

Typical forgotten senders: the invoicing program, the shop, the ticket system, the newsletter service, the applicant portal and the website server with its contact form.

That is exactly what the DMARC reports in the monitoring phase are for: they show you the list that nobody in the organisation has fully in their head.

For first tests, yes; for serious sending, no.

Two reasons: with someone else’s free-mail address you cannot set your own DNS records — SPF and DKIM belong to the provider, not to you. And recipients judge a business mail from a free-mail address differently, technology aside.

Use an address on your own domain. Everything else in this chapter assumes that.

The findings in Aurora Hive Sales tell you whether the records are correct. Whether a mail lands in the inbox or in the spam folder, only the recipient can tell you.

The practical test: send a test mail to one address at each of the big providers — one to a Microsoft account, one to a Google account, one to a German free-mail provider — and see where it ends up.

If one of them lands in spam and the others do not, it is almost always down to the content, not the DNS records.

Four causes, to be checked in this order:

1. Something about the domain has changed — a new service has been added, someone has replaced the SPF record instead of extending it.
2. The volume has jumped. A sudden rise looks like a hijacked account.
3. The list has got worse — an import with many dead addresses.
4. The content has changed — more links, a large attachment, a new type of subject line.

Point 1 is the most common and the only one that can be checked in five minutes: run the findings in Aurora Hive Sales again.

It is a signal, not a disaster. Unsubscribes are certainly better than spam complaints: anyone who unsubscribes uses the intended route; anyone who clicks “Spam” harms your sender reputation directly.

Rising unsubscribes almost always point to one of three things: the wrong audience, contacting people too often or a tone that does not fit. Go through them in order — the audience is the most common finding.

Aurora Hive Sales itself allows up to 15 MB per file. The tighter limit is set by the recipients: many servers reject messages above about 10 MB, some even earlier, and you only find out via the bounce.

So stay well below it, or use a link. For a first contact a link is the better choice anyway: smaller, less suspicious and measurable, because you can see whether someone opens it.

The big mail providers offer tools with which a sender can see how their domain is rated there — delivery rates, complaint rates, errors.

For a sender with a few hundred mails a month, this is not necessary. Anyone who regularly sends larger volumes gets figures there that nobody else has — and those are the only reliable answer to the question of whether things have improved.

Aurora Hive Sales does not need this; it is an addition, not a prerequisite.