A few weeks ago I wrote about why so many small business emails land in spam, and the three settings that fix it. I had also built a small add-on for websites that walks a shop owner through those settings step by step, then checks whether they worked. It had passed every check I ran on my own computer.

It had never run on a real website. That's a little like a recipe that has only been read, never cooked. So I installed it on one of my own sites, entered that site's real email setup, and watched what it told me.

The off-the-shelf tools for this job either want your domain account password so they can change things for you, or they assume you already know what the settings mean. I didn't want to hand anyone's keys to an add-on, and I didn't want to write instructions only an IT person could follow. So my tool only reads, explains, and checks. You stay in control of every change.

How the System Works

  • Pick Who Sends Your Email: Choose your email service from a list (Google, Microsoft, and the popular sending services), or pick "Other" and paste one value from your provider's setup page.
  • Get the Exact Settings to Copy: The tool writes out exactly what to add, with copy buttons and plain instructions, and it blends in with anything you already have instead of overwriting it.
  • Check the Real Thing: One button checks what's actually published for your domain right now. A second sends you a test email. Paste in the details from that email and it tells you, in plain English, whether all three checks passed.

Overcoming the Friction

1. It Said a Setting Was Missing When It Was Right There

The first check came back with one of the three settings marked "missing." It wasn't missing. I had set it up months ago and could see it myself. The tool had a rule about what a valid address looks like, and that rule didn't allow the leading underscore this particular setting always uses. Every person who ever used the tool would have been told this setting was missing, no matter what they did. One small change fixed it.

2. "Correct" Was Too Picky

Once the tool could find the setting, it flagged it as wrong anyway. Mine had the same instructions in a different order, plus one extra line. Computers love exact matches. People don't write things in exactly the order a tool expects, and their email providers don't either. Now the tool checks what a setting means, not whether every character lines up.

3. The "Other" Option Could Have Broken Everyone's Email

This was the scary one. My email service isn't one of the big names in the list, so I picked "Other." The only way to tell the tool about my service was to paste it in as an extra setting, and following those instructions would have created a second copy of a setting that is only allowed to exist once. Two copies don't double the protection. They cancel it, and every email fails the check. A tool built to keep mail out of spam would have pushed it straight in. "Other" now has its own box for that value, and anything pasted elsewhere gets folded into the one setting where it belongs. The tool also warns you if it ever finds two copies.

The Business Win

After the fixes, all three checks passed on the live site, and the tool's own test email landed in my inbox, marked important. Each of those three problems would have quietly misled every business owner who tried it, and the last one could have made their email worse. I found them in an afternoon on my own site, before anyone else trusted it.

I'm releasing it for free so any small shop on a WordPress website can use it. Next, I'm running a full restore drill from my backups, because a backup you've never restored is just a hope.