Have you noticed that some of your emails have come back undelivered or been marked as spam?
You may have received some notices, like the one below, that say your email wasn’t delivered. Or, if not, your recipients might have complained that your emails went into their junk folder.
If so, we know it can be a really frustrating experience and a big problem when you have important emails to send.
However, we have some good news.
This article will help you to understand what’s going on, whether you’re affected by this issue, and how to fix it.
Many email providers, particularly Gmail, have become much more strict about how they check that the emails you send are legitimate.
While we haven’t changed how emails are sent, some email providers have changed how they decide which emails they should accept and deliver. If this left you thinking ‘why did my email previously work but doesn’t work anymore’ then hopefully this helps to explain why.
There are a few records that email providers use to help them verify that you’re a trustworthy sender and that the content of your email hasn't been changed along the way. If you’re currently experiencing issues with emails returning undelivered or going to spam, the most likely cause is that these records haven’t been set up yet.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to check…
We’ve built a simple tool to show you whether your email records are set up correctly or need changing.
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The tool works for Hushmail customers that have their own email domain.
If your email address contains your email domain, usually your website address – e.g., matthew@mywebsite.com – then you can use our tool to check your email records. |
Here’s what you need to do:
At the bottom of the page, there will be green, yellow, and red indicators for specific email records. For now, don’t worry about what these acronyms mean, but simply check to see whether they all have green check marks or not.
Example:
If you’ve been experiencing issues, some or all of these records likely say they either ‘may not be ready’ or ‘are not ready’.
Our tool probably named some specific email records that need changing.
We’ll try to explain what these are in the simplest possible way, as we know that technical acronyms can feel a bit intimidating. It should only take a couple of minutes to go through this.
There are three main ‘email records’ that help to ensure your emails are delivered:
The easiest way to think about these records is to compare them to the postal service, as this one-minute video helpfully explains:
To update your email records, you don’t need to understand every technical detail about these records. Simply think of it as some useful background information for the changes you will make.
You can ask us to change your email records for you or let us help you do it yourself.
If you’re not very tech-savvy, feel scared about changing your email records yourself, or simply want to save time, we’ll happily change your email records for you.
We use a secure, encrypted form to collect this information from you so you can rest assured that your information is safe.
You can provide us with all the details here. Once we receive your information, it should take us 1-2 business days to update your records. As soon as it’s done, we’ll email you to let you know.
While it could take 1-2 business days to do it for you, the fastest option might be to change your email records yourself.
We’ve built a simple tool to show you whether your email records are set up correctly or need changing.
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There’s still help at hand if you need it |
If you feel confident changing your own email settings and getting this fixed as quickly as possible is important to you, this may be your best option.
We’ve made step-by-step guides with videos to help you change your email records. For the most popular domain providers, we have created specific instructions:
If your domain isn’t listed above, click here to watch our general instructions that should be relevant for most other providers.
While we don’t have any control over the time it takes for your email records to be updated, in most cases, we notice that it takes an hour or less for the changes to take effect.
Just be aware that most providers say it can take 1-2 days for your email records to be updated worldwide.
To confirm if you’ve successfully updated your email records, retry our checker tool. If it says your domain is ready to send and receive email, you’re good to go!