Professional communication: much more than just an email

01Email is the first document a customer receives from you

This chapter is written for anyone who works or runs a business in Italy: the technical part applies anywhere, while the signature requirements follow Italian law. Before they even see your work, many customers see your email: the reply to an inquiry, a quote, a confirmation. In that message they read three things before the content: who is writing, from which address and where it landed, in the inbox or in the spam folder. These are three judgments formed in a second, and they weigh on the impression the customer forms of the business.

Put yourself on the other side. You receive two quotes for the same job, at similar prices. The first comes from quotes@verdiengineering.it, lands in your inbox and has a tidy signature. The second comes from marco.verdi1987@gmail.com, and you find it by chance three days later in the spam folder. Who would you trust with renovating your home?

That is why business email is not “just an email”. It is the digital equivalent of letterhead: a tool that conveys reliability when it is well kept, and carelessness when it is not.

The problem with free addresses

An address like rossiplumbing@gmail.com or bianchi.studio@libero.it works, and it is convenient. But for a business it has four specific flaws:

• perception: anyone can open one in two minutes, so it proves nothing. An address on the company domain says there is a real organization behind it;
• recognizability: amid scam attempts that use exactly this kind of free, credible-sounding address, the customer has no way to tell your message apart from an imitation;
• ownership: the address belongs to the provider of the free service, not to the company. If a collaborator uses their own and then leaves, they take the correspondence with your customers with them;
• technical control: on someone else's domain you cannot publish the records that protect your identity. Google also warns that anyone sending messages as a Gmail address from non-Gmail servers may see them quarantined by the DMARC check.

What a professional address takes

The ingredients are few: a domain registered to the business, an email service to handle it (the one from your hosting provider, or the business email services of the big providers) and the correct configuration of the records in the DNS. How domains and DNS work is explained in the chapter on what happens when someone types your address. Here I focus on what happens after you hit send.

A word of caution about where your email runs: as I explain in the chapter on infrastructure, on shared hosting the reputation of the IP address your emails leave from is shared with other sites. For business email a dedicated service is the better choice, one that looks after the reputation of its own servers.

02An email's journey, and who checks it on arrival

When you press “Send”, the message does not go straight into the customer's mailbox. It leaves your email program, passes to the sending server of your service, crosses the Internet and reaches the recipient's receiving server. That is where its fate is decided.

Before delivering it, the receiving server asks itself one question: does this message really come from who it claims to be? The “From:” field of an email can in fact be written any way you like: it is like the sender on an envelope, which anyone can make up. To check it, the server reads three pieces of information in your domain's DNS, and they are precisely SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

03SPF: the list of who may send on your behalf

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a line of text published in your domain's DNS that says: “email from my domain may only leave from these servers”. The receiving server looks at where the message comes from and checks whether that sender is on the list.

An SPF record looks like this:

v=spf1 include:_spf.mailprovider.example ip4:203.0.113.10 -all

• v=spf1 says it is an SPF record;
• include: authorizes the servers of an outside service, for example your email provider or the platform you send newsletters with;
• ip4: authorizes one specific address, for example the server of your portal that sends confirmations;
• -all at the end says what to do with everyone else: reject them. The ~all variant only asks for them to be treated with suspicion.

04DKIM: the seal that proves the email is intact

SPF looks at where the message comes from. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) looks at the message itself. It works like a wax seal on a letter: the sending server applies a digital signature to every email, calculated with a private key that only it knows; the matching public key is published in the domain's DNS, and anyone can use it to verify the signature.

If the message arrives with a valid signature, the receiving server knows two things: that it was sent by someone the domain has authorized, and that nobody modified it along the way. If any part of the text or the header has been altered, the signature no longer matches.

The public key is published in a record with a special name, containing a “selector” chosen by the provider: for example s1._domainkey.yourcompany.it. The selector makes it possible to have several keys at the same time, one for each service that sends, and to replace them without interrupting your email. Google sets a 1024-bit key as the minimum and recommends a 2048-bit one.

05DMARC: the instructions for when something is off

SPF and DKIM produce a result, but on their own they do not tell the receiving server what to do if the check fails. That is the job of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance), which adds three things:

• alignment: for the message to be considered authentic, the domain verified by SPF or DKIM must match the one the customer sees in the “From:” field. This is the piece that closes the made-up-sender trick;
• a policy: what to do with messages that fail verification. p=none (just observe), p=quarantine (put them in spam), p=reject (reject them);
• reports: with rua= you specify an address to which the big email services send periodic statistics on who is sending on behalf of your domain, legitimately or not.

The record is published at a fixed address, _dmarc.yourcompany.it, and in its simplest form it looks like this:

v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourcompany.it

The careful path is always the same: start with p=none for a few weeks, read the reports to discover the legitimate services sending on your behalf without being configured (the management software, the newsletter platform, the office printer that emails scans), fix them, and only then move to quarantine and then reject. Skipping steps means risking blocking your own email.

06Gmail and Yahoo rules for senders

For years SPF, DKIM and DMARC were “recommended”. Since February 1, 2024 Google and Yahoo, which run a huge share of consumer mailboxes, have made them requirements. The rules distinguish between all senders and bulk senders, meaning those sending about 5,000 messages a day or more to their users.

A small business sending a few dozen emails a day falls into the first column. But it still pays to act as if it were in the second: configuring all three records takes an hour of work, once, protects the domain from anyone who wants to use it for scams and gives your emails the best possible chance of arriving.

07The signature: legal requirement and business card

At the bottom of every email there is a space many people neglect, yet it works with every message you send: the signature. It has two sides, a legal one and a communication one, and both deserve care.

What the law requires

For companies the Italian Civil Code (codice civile) is explicit. Article 2250 states that in their documents and correspondence companies entered in the companies register (registro delle imprese) must indicate:

• the company's registered office;
• the companies register office where it is registered and its registration number;
• for joint-stock companies (SpA), partnerships limited by shares (Sapa) and limited liability companies (Srl), the capital actually paid up, as shown in the latest financial statements;
• the state of liquidation, if the company has been dissolved, and for SpA and Srl whether there is a sole shareholder.

Business email is correspondence, so the signature is the natural place for this information. The same article extends the requirement to electronic spaces connected to public networks, which means the website too.

For anyone with a Partita IVA (the Italian VAT number), including sole proprietors and freelance professionals, the main rule concerns the website: article 35 of the VAT decree requires the VAT number to be shown on the home page of the website, and the Agenzia delle Entrate (the Italian Revenue Agency) has clarified that this also applies to sites used only for advertising. Including it in the signature as well is not required by a specific rule, but it is the most consistent choice: whoever writes to you finds the same details everywhere. Professionals registered with a professional order (ordine) should also check their order's own rules.

What helps you sell

Beyond the legal requirements, the signature is a business card the customer receives with every message, for free. An effective signature is understated, consistent and useful:

• name and role of the person writing, so the customer knows who they are talking to;
• the name of the business and a direct phone number;
• a single link to the website, or to the page most useful at that moment (bookings, customer area);
• a lightweight logo, or no image at all: many email programs block images and show an empty box;
• no long legal notices in capital letters that nobody reads, except those that are truly necessary.

08Post, flyer and email: three channels, three jobs

Email does not live alone: it works alongside the other channels, and each one has a different job.

• A social media post is fleeting: it shows up in the feed, stays visible for a few hours and reaches whatever share of the audience the algorithm decides, as the chapter on the website as an asset you own explains. It is for getting noticed.
• A well-designed flyer is physical and local: it stays on the counter, on the fridge, in a pocket, and it speaks to the neighborhood. How to design one and connect it to the digital side I explain in full in the chapter on opening a physical shop.
• Email is direct and personal: it reaches a person who has already given you their address, when it is useful to them. It is the channel for the customer you have already won.

The emails the portal sends

The most powerful way to use email is not the newsletter: it is transactional emails, the ones that go out on their own when something happens. The booking confirmation, the reminder the day before, the receipt, the notice that the order is ready. They are the most opened and most anticipated emails, because the customer is waiting for them: they contain information they need.

For them to work, three conditions are needed: a portal that generates them at the right moment, like the one described in the chapter on portals, bookings and PWAs; a sending server authorized in the SPF record and signed with DKIM, so they do not end up in spam exactly when they are needed; and clear text, with the key information in the first line. Promotional emails, on the other hand, follow the consent rules, which I explain in the chapter on GDPR and cookies.

09Before the signature, the Partita IVA

Well-configured email is ready to work: it lands in the right mailbox, introduces itself with the company name and carries at the bottom the details that make it a document. But those details, the VAT number to show on the home page and repeat in the signature, the registered office, the entry in the register, presuppose a step that comes before everything else: having a registered business.

It is the paperwork every new professional faces at the start, and it is worth knowing well before signing the first quote. The next chapter is devoted precisely to opening and managing a Partita IVA: which regime to choose, how the flat-rate regime (forfettario) works, how much you really pay and which tools you need from day one.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Google, “Email sender guidelines” (Italian edition): requirements for all senders and for those exceeding 5,000 messages a day, in force since February 1, 2024.
2. Yahoo, “Sender Best Practices”: requirements for senders and unsubscribe within 2 days.
3. RFC 7208, “Sender Policy Framework (SPF)”: the SPF standard and the ten DNS lookup limit.
4. RFC 6376, “DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures”: signature, keys and selectors.
5. RFC 7489, “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)”: alignment, policies and reports.
6. Italian Civil Code, art. 2250, “Information in documents and correspondence” (in Italian): the mandatory information for companies.
7. Presidential Decree (D.P.R.) of October 26, 1972, no. 633, art. 35 (in Italian): showing the Partita IVA on the home page of the website.
8. Agenzia delle Entrate, resolution no. 60/E of May 16, 2006 (in Italian): the requirement also applies to advertising-only sites.

Chapter updated October 2026. The sender requirements are those published by Google and Yahoo as of the same date; for the legal obligations of your specific case, your accountant (commercialista) or your professional order remains the reference.