Email deliverability basics for launch week
Forms and transactional email fail quietly. SPF, DKIM, DMARC and sane DNS matter as much as the form plugin you picked.
Launch week disasters often arrive in the spam folder. The site looks brilliant, the form submits successfully and enquiries vanish because nobody configured email authentication or tested deliverability from real inboxes.
Transactional email is infrastructure, not an afterthought. Contact forms, order confirmations, password resets and notification hooks all depend on DNS records most marketing teams have never heard of — until Gmail starts silencing you.
Minimum viable deliverability: send through a reputable ESP or SMTP service, align from-address domains with authenticated DNS, avoid spoofing @gmail.com from your server and test to major providers before announcing the launch.
Form plugins are not email infrastructure. They are triggers. If the plumbing behind them is wrong, every submission looks fine in the UI and dies quietly in transit.
Add deliverability to your launch checklist alongside SSL and redirects. Send test messages, check headers, confirm SPF/DKIM/DMARC pass and know who fixes it when something bounces at 9pm.
Common questions
- What DNS records affect email deliverability?
- SPF authorises sending servers, DKIM signs messages cryptographically and DMARC tells receivers how to handle failures. All three should be configured for domains sending transactional mail.
- Why do contact form emails go to spam?
- Common causes: sending from a free mailbox via PHP mail, missing authentication records, shared hosting IP reputation, or from-address domains that do not match the sending server.
- When should you set up email DNS before launch?
- Before go-live, especially if forms, receipts or account emails matter. DNS propagation and provider verification can take hours or days.