Author
Valentin Bora
WordPress & email deliverability consultant
I'm an independent developer and email deliverability consultant. I've been coding for 25 years, 15 of them deep in WordPress and WooCommerce, and I run Mach10, a consultancy that fixes email infrastructure and site performance for businesses that depend on both.
Most of what I write here comes from the same work I do every day: figuring out why a client's order confirmations vanish, why a contact form quietly drops leads, or why three weeks of quotes never reached anyone. The cause is almost always a broken SPF, DKIM, or DMARC setup that nobody knew about, so I built the free scanner on this site to make that visible in plain English.
Why you can trust what you read here
- Codeable-certified WordPress expert with a 5.0 rating across 184 completed projects (profile).
- Cloudflare Consult registered partner and a contributor to WordPress core.
- Author of original research: I ran the State of Small Business Email study (June 2026), a direct DNS scan of 4,673 firms across the US and Canada. The numbers cited across this site come from that dataset, not from someone else's report.
- First-hand, not theoretical: every guide here is drawn from real client work untangling deliverability, not rewritten from documentation.
Find me on LinkedIn, Codeable, or at mach10.pro. Questions about your own setup: valentin@doesmyemail.work.
Check your own domain
The fastest way to see what I'm talking about is to run your domain through the free scanner. It checks the same records Gmail and Outlook do and tells you which one is failing.
Posts by Valentin
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July 21, 2026
Cloudflare transactional email for WordPress: what it is, and how Flarepipe fits
Cloudflare Email Sending is in public beta. Here is what it costs, who it suits on WordPress, and how Flarepipe wires it up without a classic SMTP relay.
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July 20, 2026
The new EU and UK email tracking rules, in plain English
You saw a headline saying you now need permission to track email opens. What actually changed in the EU and UK in 2026, and whether it reaches a North American business.
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July 11, 2026
SPF fail: what it means when your email flunks the sender check
You saw 'SPF: fail' in a scan result or bounce message and want a straight answer. Here's what the check actually verifies, why honest businesses fail it, and how to see your own record.
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July 3, 2026
Why do my emails go to spam? The real reason, in plain English
It's rarely spammy words or bad luck. Emails usually land in spam because your domain fails three invisible identity checks. Here's what they are and how to see which one you're failing in 30 seconds.
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July 2, 2026
Why real estate agents' emails land in spam more than anyone else's
Real estate had the worst email auth in our 4,673-firm study. Why listing alerts and CRM mail land in spam, and how to check yours free.
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June 14, 2026
Why your WordPress emails go to spam (and how to tell)
Your Gmail works fine but order confirmations and form notifications vanish. Here's the real reason, and a 30-second way to check what's actually broken.
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June 14, 2026
Every mailer WP Mail SMTP supports, compared (pros and cons)
All 17 SMTP mailers WP Mail SMTP supports, compared: free tiers, pricing, setup effort, and deliverability trade-offs for WordPress.