A member makes a deposit, and the confirmation email goes to spam. They do not blame Gmail — they blame you, and they open a support ticket with an edge in it. Email deliverability is one of the least glamorous and most trust-critical parts of running a platform. The good news: it mostly comes down to three DNS records and a handful of habits.
The three records that decide where your mail lands
SPF: who may send for your domain
An SPF record is a line in your DNS listing the servers allowed to send email for your domain. Without it, anyone on earth can send mail claiming to be you, and receiving filters treat your genuine messages with suspicion as a result. With it, your platform server and your business mailbox are on the guest list; spammers are not.
DKIM: a signature on every message
DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature to each outgoing email. The receiver checks it against a key in your DNS and knows two things: the mail really came from your domain, and nobody altered it on the way. Unsigned mail from a financial platform is exactly what modern filters are trained to distrust.
DMARC: the policy that ties them together
DMARC tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM — monitor it, quarantine it, or reject it. Even starting with a monitoring policy improves how filters score your domain, and the reports it generates show you who else is sending (or pretending to send) as you.
Setting all three up properly is a one-time job; it is also one of the services in our services hub, because doing it half-right is worse than it looks — a broken DKIM key quietly poisons a domain for weeks.
Habits that help (and hurt)
- Send from your own domain. Platform mail should come from addresses on your domain, on proper business email — never from a free mailbox.
- Warm up a new domain. A brand-new domain sending hundreds of messages on day one matches the spammer profile almost exactly. Ramp volume over the first weeks.
- Keep content clean. Shouting subject lines, shortened URLs and image-only emails are classic spam signals.
- Process your bounces. Repeatedly mailing dead addresses damages sender reputation for every other member too.
- Separate the streams. Transactional mail (deposits, resets) is sacred. Marketing blasts from the same domain put it at risk; use a subdomain if you must send them.
Test it the way a member experiences it
Create test accounts at the major mailbox providers and trigger every email your platform sends: signup, deposit confirmation, payout notice, password reset. Check where each lands and view the authentication results in the message headers — you want to see SPF pass, DKIM pass, DMARC pass. Fifteen minutes of this finds problems your members would otherwise find for you, in public, at the worst time. It belongs on the same pre-launch checklist as the items in our GoldCoders launch checklist.
Why this matters beyond the inbox
Deliverability is quietly a security feature too: SPF, DKIM and DMARC are what stop strangers from sending convincing fake “payout problem” emails in your name. If you have not already, read our platform hardening checklist — your domain’s email setup is part of your platform’s defences.
From our own desk
Our own domain passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC — we verified them header by header when we set up this store’s mail, because our order confirmations and support replies travel through the same pipe our customers rely on. When a single one of those records was wrong during setup, our own test mail landed in spam within the hour. That is how fast this shows up.
The bottom line
Publish correct SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, send from your own domain on real business email, warm up gradually, and test every message type like a member. Your confirmations will land in the inbox — and members will stop wondering where they went.
