Is Your Business Email Actually Working? Ours Wasn't.

We had just shipped a new website for Nerds IV. New brand, new design, every page polished. Then we checked something we'd never thought to check: whether anyone could actually email us. They couldn't. Every message to info@nerdsiv.com, every job application, every client enquiry, every reply to an event confirmation was bouncing straight back to the sender.

No error ever reached us. That's the cruel part of a broken business email: the person writing to you sees the failure, and you see nothing. You just wonder why the phone is quieter than it should be.

Why this happens to so many businesses

A website and an email inbox feel like the same thing because they share a name. On the internet they are two completely separate systems. Your domain can point visitors to a website perfectly while having nowhere at all to deliver mail.

What tells the internet where to deliver email for your domain is a small DNS entry called an MX record (mail exchanger). No MX record, no email. Many businesses get a domain, launch a website, print the email address on business cards and flyers, and never set one up. Others had one once, then moved their website to a new host and lost it in the move. That second one is common, and easy to miss.

The two minute check

You don't need to be technical to find out if this is happening to you:

• From a personal Gmail or Yahoo account, send a short email to every address your business publishes: info@, sales@, your own.
• Wait a few minutes and check that each one actually arrives where you read your mail.
• Check the personal account too. A reply from "Mail Delivery Subsystem" saying the address was not found means your domain cannot receive mail.
• For a second opinion, type your domain into a free MX lookup tool (search "MX lookup"). If it shows no MX records, you've found the problem.

Do this today, and again any time you change website hosts or domain settings.

How we fixed ours in under an hour

We moved our mail to Zoho Mail, which has a free plan for small teams and works well in Ghana. The steps were:

• Prove we own the domain by adding one TXT record Zoho gave us.
• Add three MX records (mx.zoho.com, mx2.zoho.com, mx3.zoho.com) so mail for nerdsiv.com is delivered to Zoho.
• Add an SPF record, which tells other mail servers that Zoho is allowed to send on our behalf.
• Add a DKIM record, a digital signature on every email we send, so our replies land in inboxes instead of spam.

Then we created one mailbox and gave it several addresses: info@ for general enquiries, apply@ for job applications, events@ for webinar registrations. Everything lands in one inbox, but we can see at a glance what each message is about, and reply from the right address. If one of those desks gets its own person later, we can move the address to their mailbox without changing anything on the website.

Within minutes of the last record going live, test emails to all three addresses arrived.

A checklist for any business with its own domain

• MX records: point to your email provider, or you receive nothing.
• SPF: lists who may send mail for your domain.
• DKIM: signs your outgoing mail so it isn't marked as spam.
• DMARC: tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails those checks.
• A monthly test email to every published address.

Not sure if yours works?

If you run a business in Ghana and aren't certain your email is set up properly, write to us at info@nerdsiv.com. We'll check your domain's mail setup for free and tell you plainly what, if anything, needs fixing. And yes, we'll actually receive it.