PUP Pavers and Turf is a Palm Beach Gardens-based contractor specializing in pavers, turf, and outdoor living projects. The company operates a growing team and relies on email to communicate with prospects, clients, and vendors throughout the sales and project lifecycle.
Emails sent from the company’s domain were being quarantined by recipient mail servers before they could reach their destination. Client replies went unanswered. Follow-ups disappeared. The problem was invisible to the sender but damaging every day it went unresolved.
We diagnosed the issue, confirmed the full scope, and restored normal email delivery — without touching anything that wasn’t broken.
The Challenge
PUP Pavers and Turf had migrated their email to Google Workspace at some point, but their DNS records were never updated to reflect that change. The domain’s SPF record still authorized GoDaddy’s mail servers — the platform they had moved away from — while all of their actual email traffic was flowing through Google.
When a receiving mail server checked whether the email was authorized to come from where it claimed to come from, it found a mismatch. The result was automatic quarantine.
Compounding the issue, the domain had no DKIM record and no DMARC policy. Without those two layers of authentication in place, there was nothing to verify the message’s integrity or give receiving servers a clear instruction on how to handle it.
The company had no visibility into what was happening. There were no error messages, no bouncebacks, and no obvious indication that anything was wrong on their end. Emails appeared to send normally. They simply never arrived.
The Solution
We began with a structured pre-discovery audit using the domain’s live DNS records before any working session was scheduled. This allowed us to walk into the engagement already knowing the full picture — the misconfigured SPF, the missing DKIM, the absent DMARC, and the leftover records from prior platform migrations.
During the discovery session, we confirmed access to GoDaddy DNS management and Google Workspace admin, documented the complete email environment, and identified every service sending on behalf of the domain. No changes were made until the full scope was understood and agreed upon.
Implementation involved three precise DNS changes:
- The SPF record was corrected to authorize Google’s mail servers, replacing the GoDaddy reference that was causing the mismatch
- A DKIM record was retrieved from the Google Workspace admin console and published to the domain, enabling cryptographic verification of outgoing messages
- A DMARC policy was added, instructing receiving servers on how to handle authentication failures and routing aggregate reports to the client for ongoing visibility
Post-implementation, all three authentication layers were confirmed live and passing. A test message was delivered successfully to an external inbox with no quarantine.
A Contained Problem With a Precise Fix
Email deliverability failures are often misdiagnosed. The symptoms — no replies, disappearing follow-ups, lost communication — can look like a sales problem, a process problem, or a people problem before anyone thinks to check DNS.
For PUP Pavers and Turf, the issue had nothing to do with email content, spam filters, or recipient behavior. The domain’s authentication configuration simply hadn’t kept pace with the platform it was running on. Once that was corrected, everything worked as it should have been working all along.
The fix required no changes to their Google Workspace setup, no disruption to existing workflows, and no downtime. The three DNS records were updated and propagated within an hour.
What Pre-Discovery Made Possible
Before the first client working session, we had already identified the root cause by pulling and analyzing the domain’s live DNS records directly. This meant the discovery session could focus on access confirmation and scope validation rather than diagnosis.
It also meant the client wasn’t paying for us to figure out the problem in front of them. The technical groundwork was done in advance, the working session stayed focused, and implementation followed immediately.
This is how we approach every engagement — understand the environment before touching it, document before changing anything, and move quickly once the path is clear.
Business Value
Resolving the deliverability issue helped PUP Pavers and Turf:
- Restore reliable email delivery to clients, prospects, and vendor partners
- Eliminate the silent communication failures that had been affecting the business without any visible indication
- Establish a complete email authentication stack — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — for the first time
- Gain ongoing visibility into domain email activity through automated DMARC reporting
- Protect the domain’s sending reputation against future spoofing or misuse
- Resolve the issue with zero disruption to existing operations or workflows
The Result
Within two hours of beginning implementation, PUP Pavers and Turf had a fully authenticated email domain. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC were all passing. A test message reached its destination cleanly, and the communication problems that had been quietly undermining the business were gone.
The engagement also left the company better protected than before. With DMARC now in place, the client receives automated reports from Google showing how email sent from their domain is being handled across the internet — visibility they didn’t have before and wouldn’t have gotten from a simple SPF fix alone.
What looked like an invisible problem turned out to have a clear cause and a straightforward solution. The work required precision, not complexity — and that is exactly the kind of problem we are built to solve quickly.
