Email deliverability basics for restaurant launch week
Booking confirmations and enquiry forms fail quietly. SPF, DKIM and sane DNS matter as much as the reservation widget you picked.
Launch week disasters often arrive in the spam folder. The site looks brilliant, the form submits, and private-dining enquiries vanish because nobody configured email authentication or tested a real inbox.
Transactional mail is infrastructure. Booking confirmations, password resets for staff tools, allergen update alerts, contact forms — they all depend on DNS records most GMs have never heard of until Gmail starts silencing them.
Minimum viable: send through a proper email service, align from-addresses with authenticated DNS, do not spoof a Gmail address from the server, and test before you announce the new site on Instagram.
Form plugins are triggers, not email infrastructure. If the plumbing is wrong, every submission looks fine in the CMS and dies in transit.
Add deliverability to the launch checklist beside SSL and redirects. Send tests, check headers, know who fixes a bounce at 9pm when the first booking should have landed.
Common questions
- Why do restaurant enquiry emails vanish?
- Sending from PHP mail on cheap hosting, missing authentication, or a from-address that does not match the sending domain. The form looks fine. Gmail silently bins it.
- When should you set this up?
- Before go-live. DNS and provider verification can take hours. Launch week is a bad time to discover private-dining leads are in spam.