Spam, the silent business killer
It is a common business nightmare. You send a meticulously crafted email to a potential client. You wait. Days pass. You send a polite follow-up. Still silence. Eventually, you call them, only to hear the sentence that makes every business owner cringe:
“Oh, I didn’t see your message. It must have gone to my junk folder.”
For most companies, this is an annoyance. For a business relying on leads, invoices, and contracts, it is a silent killer. When your emails going to spam becomes a pattern, you aren’t just losing time; you are losing revenue.
At Ballito Web Design, we noticed this wasn’t just happening to one or two clients; it is an epidemic. The major email providers like Google, Microsoft (Outlook), and Yahoo have drastically tightened their security rules in the last 12 months. They are no longer just looking for “spammy” words like Free or Winner; they are looking for digital ID cards. If your domain doesn’t have them, you don’t get in.
Most hosting providers ignore this complexity. They give you an email box and wish you luck. We decided that “good luck” wasn’t a strategy.
This is the story of how we stopped accepting the status quo and built a custom automated system, a digital “Watchdog” to ensure our clients’ emails land exactly where they belong: the Inbox.
Chapter 1: The “Dirty Secret” of Most Hosting Providers.
To understand why your emails fail, you have to understand the dirty secret of the web hosting industry.
When you buy a standard hosting package, whether it costs R50 or R500 a month, you are typically buying space on a server. You get a control panel (such as DirectAdmin or cPanel), a file manager for your website, and a mail server to send and receive messages.
On the surface, it looks perfect. You create “info”@yourcompany.co.za, you send a test email to your spouse, and it arrives. You think you are safe.
But here is what the hosting companies rarely tell you: Default setups are no longer enough.
In the old days of the internet, email was like a postcard. Anyone could write “From: The President” on the back, and the postman would deliver it. Today, spammers abuse this trust by domain spoofing, pretending to be your bank, your boss, or your business to steal data.
To fight this, Google and Microsoft now demand proof of identity. They ask three specific questions every time your email knocks on their door:
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Is this IP address allowed to send mail for this company?
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Has this email been tampered with in transit?
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If the answer to either is “No”, what should I do with it?
If your hosting provider hasn’t strictly configured the answers to these questions, your email is treated like a stranger without an ID card. It might get in, but it will be watched suspiciously. And the moment you send something slightly unusual, an invoice with a link, a PDF attachment, or a bulk newsletter, the door slams shut by not delivering your email or sending it to spam.
Simply “hosting” emails is not enough. We need to “authenticate” them, that’s the extra step to ensure emails get delivered to the inbox.
Chapter 2: The Alphabet Soup (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)
If you have ever Googled “fix email deliverability,” you have likely drowned in acronyms. SPF. DKIM. DMARC. It sounds like technical jargon designed to confuse you, but the concepts are actually quite simple.
To explain how we secure our clients, think of your email domain like a Secure Office Building.
1. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – The Guest List
Imagine you have a security guard at the front gate of your office. You give him a clipboard with a list of names: “Only let these people in.”
That is SPF. It is a text record in your website’s DNS (Domain Name System) that lists the IP addresses allowed to send email on your behalf.
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If your website sends a contact form, that server IP must be on the list.
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If you use Outlook/Microsoft 365, their servers must be on the list.
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If you use an accounting system like Xero or Sage, they must be on the list.
If an email arrives from an IP not on the list, the receiver (Google/Outlook) gets suspicious.
2. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) – The Wax Seal
Now imagine you are sending a confidential letter. To prove it hasn’t been opened or changed by a spy along the way, you pour hot wax on the envelope and stamp it with your unique family crest.
That is DKIM. It adds a digital “signature” to every email you send. When the email arrives, the receiver checks the signature against a public “key” on your domain. If the wax seal is broken (the code doesn’t match), they know the email was altered or forged.
3. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) – The Instruction Manual
This is the most critical piece, and the one most often missing.
SPF and DKIM are just checks. But what happens if they fail? Without instructions, the receiver has to guess. “Do I let it in? Do I junk it? It looks fake, but maybe it’s important?”
DMARC is a rulebook you give to Google and Microsoft. It tells them exactly what to do if an email fails the ID check.
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p=none: “Just tell me about it, but let the email through.” (Monitoring mode).
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p=quarantine: “If it fails, put it in the Spam folder.”
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p=reject: “If it fails, destroy it. Do not let it in.”
For maximum deliverability, you eventually want to be at p=reject. This tells the world, “If it isn’t signed by me, it isn’t from me. Delete it.” It boosts your reputation immensely because hackers can no longer use your domain.
Chapter 3: The Breaking Point
At Ballito Web Design, we manage hosting for a significant number of clients with our sister company Ballitohosting.co.za. We pride ourselves on being a “Managed” solution, meaning our clients shouldn’t have to worry about server settings.
However, the email landscape shifted. We noticed that even when we set up SPF and DKIM correctly, things could still break.
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A client would sign up for a new invoicing tool and forget to tell us. Suddenly, their invoices would bounce because the new tool wasn’t on the “Guest List” (SPF).
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A client would migrate their office email to Microsoft 365 but leave their website on our servers. This “Hybrid” setup often confuses authentication filters.
We were flying blind. We would only find out about a problem when a client called us, frustrated that their emails going to spam were costing them business.
We realised we needed visibility. We needed to know about a failure before the client did.
We turned on DMARC reporting for all our domains. Suddenly, Google and Microsoft started sending us daily reports, hundreds of them. These reports are sent as complex XML files, often zipped or compressed, containing thousands of lines of code.
It was impossible to read manually. We were receiving hundreds of files a day. We had the data, but we couldn’t use it. We needed a way to filter the noise and find the fires.
Chapter 4: Building “The Watchdog”
We looked for existing software to help us. The options were polarising. There are enterprise tools costing thousands of dollars a month, or overly simple free tools that require us to manually register every single client domain one by one, an administrative nightmare that wouldn’t scale.
So, we did what we do best: We built our own.
We developed a custom PHP-based automation system—internally codenamed “The Watchdog, that lives directly on our servers watching all our clients’ domains. It effectively acts as a 24/7 security analyst for every single client we host.
How It Works
1. Centralised Intelligence. We reconfigured the DNS records of every client to send their daily DMARC reports to a central, secure processing hub managed by us. This means instead of our clients getting confusing XML files they can’t read, the data comes straight to our analysis engine.
2. The Daily Patrol. Every morning, our Watchdog wakes up. It connects to the secure hub and downloads every report received from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other major ISPs over the last 24 hours.
It handles the technical heavy lifting automatically:
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It unzips Google’s compressed archives.
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It decodes Microsoft’s GZIP files.
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It reads the raw XML data.
3. Smart Logic (The “Traffic Light” System). The script doesn’t just read the data; it understands it. We programmed it with specific logic relevant to our hosting environment.
It looks at every single email sent from your domain and categorises it:
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Green (Pass): The email had a valid SPF entry and a valid DKIM signature. The Watchdog ignores this. No news is good news.
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Amber (Partial): Maybe SPF failed (perhaps you forwarded an email), but DKIM passed. The email was still delivered. The Watchdog logs this but knows it didn’t impact your business.
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Red (Critical Failure): This is what we are looking for. If an email failed SPF AND failed DKIM, it means it was likely blocked or sent to spam.
4. The Alert. If the Watchdog finds a “Red” failure, it triggers an immediate alert to our support team.
The alert tells us:
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Who: Which client domain failed.
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Where: The IP address the email came from.
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Why: Exactly which check failed.
This allows us to differentiate between a Hacker (someone in a foreign country trying to spoof your domain) and a Misconfiguration (you started using Mailchimp and didn’t tell us).
Note. It is important to note that DMARC reports do not contain the actual content of your emails. They are technical summary reports generated by providers like Google and Microsoft. Our system analyses only this technical metadata (IP addresses, authentication tags, and volume counts). We cannot see your subject lines, message bodies, or attachments. Your confidential business communications remain completely private, secure, and unseen by our system.
Chapter 5: The Result
Since deploying the Watchdog, the shift in our email reliability has been fundamental.
We now monitor a vast network of domains every single day. The volume of data we process is immense, yet the system filters out 99% of the noise, leaving us with only the actionable data we need to protect our clients.
Real-World Scenarios We Solved
The “Missing Invoice” Mystery: We received an alert for a client in the construction industry. Their emails were failing authentication from a specific IP address. We analysed the alert and realised they had started using a new cloud accounting package. Because the system alerted us, we were able to contact them and say: “We see you are using a new invoicing system. Please send us their settings so we can authorise them.” We fixed it before they even realised their invoices were landing in junk folders.
The “Spam Cannon”: The Watchdog flagged a high volume of failures for a retail client. The source IP was from a country where they do no business. It was a spoofing attempt, someone trying to use their good reputation to send spam. Because we saw the failure reports confirming that our DMARC policy was rejecting these fake emails, we could confirm to the client that their security was holding firm. Their reputation remained intact.
The “Hybrid” Headache: Many of our clients use Microsoft 365 for their staff email, but use our servers for their website contact forms. This “Hybrid” setup is notoriously difficult to secure because you have two different servers claiming to be the same domain. Our system is intelligent enough to recognise both valid sources. It validates the Microsoft traffic and the website traffic independently, ensuring that a customer enquiry from your website never gets lost just because your Outlook is hosted elsewhere.
Chapter 6: Why This Matters
Email deliverability is no longer something you can set and forget. It is a moving target. Google and Yahoo are constantly updating their requirements, demanding stricter authentication and better security hygiene.
At Ballito Web Design, we believe that hosting is about more than just keeping a server online. It is about ensuring your business stays online.
We built this technology because we refuse to let our clients lose business to a spam filter. We check your email health 365 days a year, so that when you hit “Send,” you can be confident your message is being heard.
Crucially, we provide this service entirely for free to all Ballito Hosting clients. We do not charge an extra fee for this protection because we believe that email deliverability is critical to the success of our clients.
