One missing DNS record, four weeks of dead email
February was a bad month, and everyone treated it as a bad month. Slow season, soft market, one of those stretches. The explanation was reasonable enough that nobody went looking for a cause.
That same February, the major mailbox providers had started requiring an authentication record the sending domain did not have. Nothing errored. The emails sent, and a portion of them simply never landed. There is no alert for mail that arrives nowhere.
Nothing errored. The emails sent, and a portion simply never landed. The team experienced it as a slow month.
The fix was one DNS record and took under an hour. The four weeks in front of it had already been explained away, which is what makes this class of failure expensive: it does not look like a failure. It looks like a slow February.
Appointments down and nobody can say why? That is the thing I do.