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Email Deliverability · Security Ring

Document your full email infrastructure in one place

1-2 hr Impact: medium Effort: low ✓ Manual completion

Documenting your complete email infrastructure in one place, every sending tool, every DNS record, every authentication setting, turns scattered tribal knowledge into a real reference anyone (including future you) can consult without having to reconstruct it from memory.

Email infrastructure tends to accumulate complexity over time as tools get added, and without documentation, troubleshooting a future deliverability issue means starting from scratch each time.

The full picture

Comprehensive documentation of your complete email infrastructure addresses a genuine, practical need that becomes increasingly important as your email ecosystem grows in complexity across the various tools, configurations, and authentication settings discussed throughout this broader email security work — without this documentation, genuine institutional knowledge about your actual configuration can become scattered or lost over time.

This documentation serves multiple genuine practical purposes — enabling faster troubleshooting when issues arise, since you have a clear reference for your actual intended configuration rather than needing to reverse-engineer your setup during a crisis, and providing genuine continuity if the people originally responsible for this configuration are no longer available to explain undocumented decisions and setup details.

A genuinely comprehensive version of this documentation should capture your actual DNS records related to email, every legitimate sending tool and its specific authentication configuration, your DMARC policy and its rationale, and any other configuration decisions relevant to understanding your complete, current email infrastructure as it genuinely exists today.

This documentation deserves periodic updates as your infrastructure evolves, rather than being created once and left to gradually become outdated — establishing a practice of updating this documentation whenever genuine configuration changes occur ensures it remains a reliable, accurate reference reflecting your actual current setup rather than a historical snapshot that no longer matches reality.

How to do it

  1. 1
    List every tool that sends email as your domain
    Main provider, marketing tools, transactional services, anything with sending access.
  2. 2
    Document your actual DNS records
    SPF, DKIM selectors, DMARC policy, MX records, all in one reference.
  3. 3
    Note who has administrative access to what
    Which accounts control which pieces of this infrastructure.
  4. 4
    Keep it updated as things change
    A stale document is only marginally better than no document, this needs to be a living reference.

Common mistakes

How you will know it is done

A single, current document exists describing your complete email infrastructure.

Track this in your hive

The Security Ring turns this into a real, permanent mission — mark it complete once you have genuinely done it.

Open this mission in H.I.V.E. →