I use a unique domain address (basically my oddball last name) because I thought “What could be easier for folks emailing me to remember, firstname@lastname.com?”
Turns out many emails don’t get delivered because:
mx.google.com gave this error:
This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM. For this message, DKIM checks did not pass and SPF check for [lastname.com] did not pass with ip: [2a01:111:f400:7e89::604]. The sender should visit Gmail Help
I can’t figure out the instructions or whether I want SPF or DKIM. Anybody else go through this? I’d change my domain name to a less dangerous-seeming one but I just sent out a change of email addy notice a few months back and do not wish to do it again.
They SPF & DKIM are both mechanisms to authenticate that email purportedly from you really is from you, not spoofed and really from somebody else = a spammer. Different recipient mail providers pay attention to one the other, or both. So you want both, not one or the other. Lest your mails be assumed to be spam.
Tech support at whichever entity provides your email service and/or your DNS service should be able to assist you on setting this up.
I eventually had to switch both mail providers and DNS providers to solve the same problems w nondelivered mail from my own custom domain.
The company that hosts your domain probably has something similar. If not, the link I gave shows the format, you’ll just have to find out how to edit your DNS records.
Who registers your domain name and who provides your DNS services are not necessarily the same folks. GoDaddy’s explanation is good, but there’s not enough info there to enable anyone to actually update their own DNS data even if they are a GoDaddy customer for DNS services.
It bugged me not to know the acronyms, so I took the following from Wikipedia for other people like me.
SPF: Sender Policy Framework
SPF allows the receiving mail server to check during mail delivery that a mail claiming to come from a specific domain is submitted by an IP address authorized by that domain’s administrators.
DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail
DKIM allows the receiver to check that an email claimed to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain