TechnicalFix website emails that never arrive or land in spam
Act as a senior engineer who understands email delivery. Emails from my {{tech_stack}} site, such as sign-up confirmations, password resets or contact form alerts, don't arrive or land in spam. Sending domain: {{website_url}}. What happens: {{steps_to_reproduce}}
Find where the email stops. Check in order, showing the evidence at each step:
1. Did our code try to send? Server or function logs for the send call and the provider's response. A swallowed error, or a promise not awaited before a serverless function exits, often means it never left
2. Did the provider accept it? The email service's activity log: sent, bounced, blocked or suppressed. An earlier bounce or spam complaint puts an address on a suppression list
3. Did it reach the inbox? The message headers in a test inbox, showing SPF, DKIM and DMARC results
Likely causes for this symptom:
- Sending from a domain that isn't verified with the provider, or from a free email address
- SPF, DKIM or DMARC missing or wrong in DNS, or two SPF records
- A From address that doesn't match the verified domain
- Auth emails still on the platform's default sender, with tight rate limits
- A sandbox or test mode that only delivers to verified addresses
- Spammy signals: link shorteners, an image-only email, no plain-text version
Make the smallest fix and give me any DNS records to add as type, host and value, then a way to confirm with a header check. Don't log full email bodies or addresses. Add an alert for failed sends so they never fail silently, and explain it in plain words.