Gmail and Yahoo Recipient Email Addresses, and DKIM, SPF and DMARC

Some of you may not realize that your WordPress based emails, such as Password Reset, may be blocked now by Google and Yahoo email servers with their changes last month.

Your WordPress software is going to default to sending these emails out with the domain address.  But if you haven’t set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records properly, even if you have an MX record for receiving and sending email elsewhere, they could be blocked.  We discovered this very thing on some sites.  Easiest thing is to establish a mailbox on your domain for sending from the website, and using a plugin that will allow you to send from that mailbox server rather than whatever server your host is allowing your WordPress install to email from, and then making sure your custom DNS records reflect this.

There are several plugins available for such purposes, such as WP Mail SMTP,  which will walk you through the process easily.

For web sites that have limited users, primarily admins, this may not seem to be a big thing, but it can impact delivery by email of 2FA codes, for example.  And for membership websites, this can have quite an impact, keeping members that don’t remember their passwords from accessing your member side of the website.

Better to take care of now than find out later that members haven’t been able to log in for months.

(Note to KFI clients: no worries, we are taking care of this for you.)