The missing third

Take what your email raised last Ramadan. Some share of the people you sent it to never saw it. Not deleted. Not ignored. Never delivered anywhere they would look.

How big a share? That is the uncomfortable part: nobody can tell you. No report arrives about it. The campaign dashboard still fills with numbers, the appeal still goes out on time, and the gap never announces itself. For a list that has been sending for years with nobody minding the sending side, a third is entirely possible.

This note is about the most visible cause, because it is the one you can check yourself before you finish your tea.

The instruction your domain gives, or does not

When an email arrives claiming to come from your charity, Gmail and Microsoft ask a simple question: what does this domain want us to do with mail that fails its checks? The answer is supposed to live in a small public record on your domain, called DMARC.

With no record, there is no instruction. The providers decide for themselves. Some of your mail gets through. Some quietly does not. And because the record is public, anyone can see in about four seconds whether your charity has one. That includes the spam filters, and it includes us.

This stopped being optional some time ago. Google made DMARC a requirement for bulk senders in February 2024. Microsoft followed. Not a recommendation. A requirement, of the kind that gets enforced gradually and silently, which is the worst way for the sender.

What we found across the sector

In August 2026 we ran the same four-second check on the eight largest Muslim charities in Britain. Four had no DMARC record at all. A fifth had one set to monitoring only, which reports problems and prevents none.

So this is not a small-charity problem, and it is not a competence problem. These are well-run organisations raising millions. It is a sector problem: email is the channel everyone uses and nobody owns, and the sending side belongs to whoever last touched the website settings.

Check yours in under a minute

You do not need us for this part, and we would rather you saw it with your own eyes.

1. Open any public DNS lookup tool in your browser. Searching for a TXT lookup tool will surface several free ones.
2. Look up the TXT record for _dmarc.yourdomain.org.uk, swapping in the domain your emails send from. Mind the underscore at the front.
3. Read what comes back. A record starting v=DMARC1 means an instruction exists. Then look for the policy inside it: p=none means monitoring only, reporting problems and preventing none. p=quarantine or p=reject means your domain actually tells providers what to do.
4. If nothing comes back, check one thing before concluding it is missing: some organisations host the record through an alias, so a bare lookup can report an empty answer when a record exists one step along the chain. If your IT support set things up, ask them to confirm. We nearly misread a well-configured charity this way, which is why this step is in the list.

One more honest caveat in the other direction: a record existing does not mean everything arrives. DMARC sits on top of two other checks, and a strict policy on a misconfigured set-up can make things worse. The four-second check tells you whether anyone is at the wheel. It does not tell you the road is clear.

Why this matters more in August than in January

The fix is not expensive. It is slow, which is a different problem. Once the records are right, inbox providers change their mind about a sender over weeks, not days. They watch how real recipients treat your mail, and trust rebuilds at their pace.

Ramadan 1448 begins around 8 February 2027. Count the weeks backwards from there and the arithmetic does itself: a domain that starts repairing in September walks into February trusted. A domain that starts in January walks in mid-conversation.

Whatever your email raised last Ramadan, the share that never arrived was decided months before the first appeal was written. That is the missing third, and August is when it is still recoverable.