When you connect your email to Tern, the platform sends emails directly through your existing email account - your actual Gmail, Microsoft, or other mail account. Tern doesn't create a separate sending service; it connects to your inbox through an API and sends on your behalf using your own account.

This means the emails genuinely come from you. But it also means they're being sent programmatically - driven by software rather than you sitting in Gmail or Outlook and hitting send yourself.

Modern email providers like Google and Yahoo can detect this difference. And in recent years, they've introduced stricter policies that flag or block emails that look like they were sent via automation, especially if the domain behind that email address isn't configured with the right authentication records.

If those records are missing or misconfigured, your emails may land in spam - or not arrive at all - without any bounce notification to let you know.

Your email address has a domain - the part after the @ sign, like tern.travel, youragency.com, or yourname.com. DNS records attached to that domain tell the rest of the internet important things about that address, including what kinds of senders and sending methods are considered legitimate.

When Tern sends an email through your account via API, receiving mail servers look at those DNS records and make a judgment call: does this look like a real, authorized email? If the records suggest something is off - or if they're missing entirely - the email gets treated as suspicious.

This isn't unique to Tern. Any software that connects to your inbox and sends on your behalf faces the same scrutiny. The fix is making sure your domain's authentication records are correctly set up so that your email provider - and the providers your clients use - recognize the email as legitimate.

SPF declares which sending methods are authorized for your domain. When email is sent through an API connection rather than directly from a mail client, some configurations will flag this as unauthorized. A correctly configured SPF record ensures API-driven sending isn't treated as suspicious.

DMARC is a policy that tells receiving mail servers what to do when something about an email looks off. If your DMARC policy is set too strictly, it can cause emails sent through Tern to be blocked or quarantined - even if everything else is working correctly. Getting it to a permissive baseline ensures legitimate emails aren't caught in the crossfire.

DKIM is a digital signature that proves an email came from where it says it came from and wasn't altered in transit. Without it, API-sent emails are more likely to be treated with suspicion by receiving servers, since they can't verify the email's authenticity.

There are typically two parties involved, and sometimes you need to work with both.

Your DNS or domain manager is whoever you bought your domain from or whoever manages your domain settings. This could be GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, Bluehost, Google, Cloudflare, or others. This is where the actual DNS records (SPF, DMARC, DKIM) live and get updated.

Your email provider is the service that handles your actual inbox - Google (Gmail or Google Workspace), Microsoft (Outlook or Microsoft 365), or another provider via IMAP. In some cases your email provider and your domain manager are the same company, but not always.

The DNS records need to be correctly configured in your domain manager, and they need to align with what your email provider expects. If the two are out of sync, that's often where delivery problems come from.

If you're not sure who manages your domain, check where you pay for your domain or website hosting. If you're unsure who your email provider is, look at how you log in to your email.

In all cases, Tern cannot make these changes. They live in your domain and email accounts, which only you or your IT contact can access.

To see if your domain has a configuration issue, go to your email settings in Tern and check the email deliverability section. Any warnings about your domain will be listed there.

Once you know what the issue is, contact your domain manager or email provider's support team and ask them to fix it. In some cases you may need to contact both.

When you reach out, include:

Their support team handles these requests regularly and should be able to resolve it quickly.