Email Is A Liar: What Independent Creators Need to Know About Email Authentication & Security
You started a newsletter and now half your subscribers report they stopped getting it. Or someone is sending phishing emails from your domain and you found out from a reader. This talk is about why email does that, and what one person with a domain and a DNS panel can actually do to fix it.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are usually framed as enterprise problems. They are not. If you own a domain and send email from it, they are your problems too, and most of the public guidance is written for sysadmins managing thousands of mailboxes, not for the person running a Substack on the side.
I have spent the last eight years watching independent creators, small businesses, and solo operators get hit by email authentication failures they did not know they had. Newsletters silently routed to spam after an ESP migration. Domains spoofed for months before the owner noticed. Custom SMTP setups that worked fine until a sending reputation collapse made them stop working overnight.
This talk covers:
- How a receiving mail server actually decides whether to deliver, junk, or reject your message
- What SPF, DKIM, and DMARC each protect against, and the failure modes they do not catch
- Why "I configured it last year" is not the same as "it is still working"
- Hidden senders: how Mailchimp, Substack, ConvertKit, Buttondown, and your custom SMTP relay each interact with your authentication, and how a single misconfigured one breaks the rest
- How to find out, today, whether someone is currently spoofing your domain
- A prioritized checklist for getting authentication in order without a dedicated IT team
The talk is product-agnostic. Every recommendation works regardless of registrar, DNS host, or ESP.
Iris is a Customer Success Engineer at Red Sift, where she implements DMARC, MTA-STS, and BIMI for customers from one-person newsletters to global enterprises. She has been in email security since 2018. From starting in email support at Rackspace to backend engineering at Mailgun.
She also keeps geckos, frogs, a hognose snake, and isopods, runs a 3D printer, and has strong opinions about mechanical keyboards.