My Zoho books emails and invoices were going to spam and not being seen by my clients!
I had sped through a couple parts of the initial Zoho books email validation setup and either missed a step or maybe failed to hit a couple buttons to finish the setup.
I went back through my email configuration setup in Zoho Books to track down the problem.
I went to Settings>Emails>Sender Email Preferences (direct link here) and could see that the email address I had added was not yet validated.
That’s the screen after I validated.
My screen originally showed a red warning message to validate. I clicked that and it gave me spf and txt records to add to my domain registrar. I use Cloudflare to protect my domain names, but Advanced DNS zone settings will be somewhat similar regardless of your registrar. I encourage protecting your domain from botnets with Cloudflare regardless of where you keep your domain name renewal/subscription set.
The Zoho records and instructions were mostly clear, except the DKIM settings didn’t not explicitly state that this will need to go in a txt record. (A small thing that can be confusing if you need the step by step and don’t do this type of thing every day. I’ve done it hundreds of times over the years, and still need the reminder.)
Once the above items (above) are added to your DNS Zone record (my example below). hit the Red Validate button in Zoho (above).
Apologies for all the above/below comments, its just how this quick guide worked itself out!
Bonus guides for spf records
If you have configured multiple services to connect and send email on your behalf, you may need to add multiple spf values. See this guide here.