Is Google Rejecting Your Emails?

You Need Another DNS Record.

At some point in the recent past, emails from an account of mine started getting rejected by google. That particular site is hosted by Cloudways, and the email is handled by Rackspace. The long and nonsensical details.txt file that came back with the rejected message contained the following essential clue “DKIM = did not pass.“

I’ve since fixed the problem, and I just wanted to put some help out there for others who might be banging their head against the same wall. Apparently, Google had decided in its infinite wisdom that my email was spam. To keep them from making that assumption, I had to add an additional DNS record. The code that I dropped into the record came from the support team at Cloudways.

It should have been a very simple process, but there was of course a language barrier. And I’m not talking about English vs. wherever the lovely lady assisting me was from. I mean the language barrier of people who work in tech vs those who don’t. So she sent me this as though it was an obvious fix:

“Here are the DKIM record for: Domain Removed for Security
TXT record value:RemovedforSecurity_domainkey

TXT record key:v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=long string of nonsense”

The problem is that DNS records are setup like this:

Type   Host   Value   TTL

So how this translated into reality is that I created a single TXT Record (Type). The ‘TXT record value’ that she gave me was what I entered in for Host. The ‘TXT record key’ is what I entered in for value. For TTL, I entered the lowest possible value which is the standard approach.

It immediately fixed the problem.