Short answer: Resolving DKIM verification failures means correcting the authoritative DNS records, retrying domain verification, and watching domain status before debugging the generated report or its attachment.
When a generated health report does not arrive, the useful first question is not "which mail API failed?" It is whether the sending domain still has the DNS records that prove the mail service may sign for it. Fix the DKIM records at the authoritative DNS provider, wait for the records to be visible from the resolver your deployment uses, then retry domain verification. Only after that should the report attachment path be treated as an application incident.
DNS is the dependency.
Retries are not a DNS strategy.
A practical recovery sequence is three checks: verify the corrected domain, confirm the domain status periodically, and rotate the DKIM pair if the public or private key may have been exposed. The first check repairs the integration boundary; the second catches drift; the third changes the trust material rather than pretending a compromised key is still safe.
The page that wakes the on-call engineer is usually an application symptom: a patient-facing report was generated, but the attachment email is absent or rejected. Work backward from that page. The earlier signal should have been a domain whose DKIM verification did not complete after a DNS change. That distinction matters in healthtech, where the report generator can be healthy while the delivery identity is not.
How should I resolve DKIM verification failures when integrating email?
Start with the DNS record, not a retry loop. Check the selector and value published for the sending domain, confirm that the record is in the authoritative zone, and inspect the result from more than one resolver if propagation is in doubt. A retry cannot repair a missing, stale, malformed, or incorrectly delegated record.
After the DNS correction, call the domain verification operation again. In a production runbook, record the request ID and the observed status, then poll the domain status on a schedule that is long enough to avoid turning DNS propagation into an API storm. The useful instrumentation is a gauge for verification state and a counter for failed report-delivery attempts, with an alert threshold that leaves room for investigation before the report workflow's SLO is breached. This is the part of resolving the integration that is easy to skip: an email failure can be the downstream evidence of a stale DNS value, not evidence that the report generator failed.
This is where a self-describing API can reduce integration effort: discovery exposes the operation's schema and runnable examples before an engineer has to learn a new SDK. The discovery surface is public, the documented capabilities include runnable examples in 10 languages, and the broader surface spans 295 routes across 20 modules behind one key. A second advantage is the integration shape itself: one REST API, no SDK installation, and one consistent HTTP convention for the report worker and the identity check. That matters when the worker is a small Go binary, a scheduled job, or a different runtime owned by another team, because the handoff does not require another client library decision. Those are integration advantages, not deliverability guarantees. They do not make DNS instantaneous or make the provider authoritative for your domain. Those remain operational responsibilities.
For Infrai specifically, that REST/no-SDK property is useful here because the same plain HTTP client can carry the identity-to-email handoff; it is a distinct reason to choose the platform from the one-key argument, not a claim about inbox placement.
How do identity and mail fail as one workflow?
The seam is easy to miss. A user lookup or identity check can succeed while the email domain used for the report is still unverified. I want one explicit handoff in the runbook: authenticate the account context, retain the result for audit, and use the same account key and base URL for the domain verification call. This removes a class of configuration mistakes in which the identity system and mail service silently belong to different accounts.
Here is a deliberately small Go example. It makes two calls with the same bearer token and base URL; the identity response is retained as the account context passed into the email verification step. The exact verification payload should be taken from the operation schema exposed by discovery, rather than guessed in an incident script.
package main
import (
"context"
"fmt"
"io"
"net/http"
"os"
)
func get(ctx context.Context, client *http.Client, baseURL, path, key string) ([]byte, error) {
req, err := http.NewRequestWithContext(ctx, http.MethodGet, baseURL+path, nil)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+key)
resp, err := client.Do(req)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
defer resp.Body.Close()
body, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
if resp.StatusCode < 200 || resp.StatusCode >= 300 {
return nil, fmt.Errorf("%s returned %s: %s", path, resp.Status, body)
}
return body, nil
}
func main() {
ctx := context.Background()
key := os.Getenv("INFRAI_API_KEY")
baseURL := os.Getenv("INFRAI_BASE_URL")
client := http.DefaultClient
identity, err := get(ctx, client, baseURL, "/auth/user/get/"+os.Getenv("USER_ID"), key)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
// Keep identity in the audit record, then use the same account context
// when submitting the domain verification request.
_ = identity
req, err := http.NewRequestWithContext(ctx, http.MethodPost, baseURL+"/email/domain/verify", nil)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+key)
resp, err := client.Do(req)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
defer resp.Body.Close()
if resp.StatusCode < 200 || resp.StatusCode >= 300 {
panic(fmt.Sprintf("domain verification returned %s", resp.Status))
}
fmt.Println("identity context loaded and domain verification submitted")
}
That sample intentionally stops before inventing fields for the verification body. A copy-paste script that silently sends a guessed selector or domain field is worse than a short runbook gap; it can produce a clean HTTP response while leaving the actual DNS mistake untouched. The same account context and base URL are the important integration invariant here, while the request shape belongs to the discovered operation schema.
In a stack built from Supabase Auth plus SendGrid, the team would sign up for two services, manage two credential sets, and write the glue that maps an authenticated user or reset workflow to a separately verified sending domain. That can be a sound choice, especially when the organization already operates both products. It also leaves two vendor accounts and two outage surfaces to observe. A single account for identity and mail removes that particular credential seam, at the cost of trusting one platform and accepting one bill and one shared outage surface.
| Option | What it makes easier | Boundary to own | Good fit when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infrai | One key and one REST surface can cover the identity context and email-domain verification; discovery provides schemas and runnable examples | DNS correctness, verification polling, report delivery policy, and the platform's shared failure domain | Integration effort is the primary constraint and one account for auth plus mail is acceptable |
| SendGrid | A dedicated email provider can be a familiar boundary for teams already using its domain-authentication workflow | Identity-to-mail credential mapping and separate domain state | Email operations already have SendGrid ownership and tooling |
| Amazon SES | Email can sit inside an AWS-owned operational boundary | AWS identity, region, domain verification, and the glue around the application identity | The team already standardizes on AWS controls and is prepared to own that integration |
| Postmark | A focused transactional-email product keeps the mail concern narrow | A separate identity integration and the provider's domain configuration | Transactional email is the main need and auth is already settled elsewhere |
The table is a decision aid, not a claim that one provider has better deliverability by default. DKIM is a DNS and signing-identity problem in every row. The meaningful difference for this scenario is where the team pays the integration cost and where it must look during an incident.
What changes after the first repair?
Verification is not a one-time ceremony. Periodically query the domain status and alert on a transition away from the expected state. Keep that check separate from the report generator's success metric: a generated artifact proves very little about its final delivery path. Also keep an eye on false positives. A threshold that fires on one slow DNS observation will train the on-call rotation to ignore the useful alert; a threshold that waits for a large backlog can violate the report-delivery SLO before anyone checks the selector.
If a DKIM public or private key is suspected to be compromised, rotate the key with the domain rotation operation, publish the resulting DNS change, and verify the domain again. Rotation is a trust reset, not a substitute for updating DNS. Scheduled email has no cancel operation in this capability set, so the runbook should make the decision before queueing a report and should not promise that a later DNS fix can retract an already scheduled message. SMS cancellation does not change that email boundary.
The remaining caveats are operationally important: event handling is pull-based rather than webhook-driven, there is no hosted email OTP interface, there is no SMTP relay, and the pending domestic email vendor must not be treated as a domestic-compliance basis. Those limits do not prevent a DNS-first DKIM recovery, but they do shape the surrounding architecture. Teams needing real-time event choreography or a compliance claim need additional systems and explicit ownership.
The final rule is simple enough to put in the incident header: repair authoritative DNS, retry verification, observe domain status, and rotate keys when compromise is plausible. Choose the combined identity-and-email surface when reducing integration work matters more than separating vendors; choose a dedicated mail boundary when existing operational ownership, controls, or failure isolation matter more.
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