Email deliverability checker

How the eight-item self-audit is scored

Nothing on this page queries DNS. You tick the controls you have already put in place, the tool adds up the weight attached to each ticked item, and the total is expressed out of the hundred points on offer. It is a declaration rather than a lookup, so the honesty of the input decides the usefulness of the output — tick only what you could point at right now in a DNS panel or a provider setting.

The eight items are deliberately not worth the same. Warming mailboxes before real sending carries the heaviest weight at sixteen. SPF and DKIM are worth fourteen apiece and DMARC twelve. A further twelve each go to capping per-mailbox daily volume in the region of thirty to fifty and to verifying the list before you send to it. A branded tracking domain and a separate domain reserved for outreach close the list at ten each.

Your answers stay on the device. There is no upload step, no stored result and no account, which makes the audit safe to run against a client's setup as well as your own.

Why warmup outweighs authentication in this weighting

Authentication behaves like a gate, not a ranking factor. Publishing SPF and DKIM stops your mail being rejected or junked on sight, but it never makes a brand-new mailbox trusted, and receivers still judge you on how you behave afterwards. That is the reasoning behind warmup outweighing any single record: it is the step most senders skip, and skipping it is obvious to the receiving provider from the very first burst.

Volume and list hygiene sit alongside DMARC for the same reason. A mailbox pushed hard from day one, or a list nobody screened for dead addresses, erodes a domain's standing within days however correct the records are. The two ten-point items are quieter but real: a shared tracking domain hands you the reputation of every other sender using it, and running outreach from the domain your invoices go out on means one bad campaign can take your business mail down with it.

Reading your score band

The number describes your setup; it does not predict placement. Two senders on identical scores can see different results because their history, list and copy differ. What the band does tell you reliably is whether the mechanics are ready to carry volume.

80 and above

The mechanics are in place. At this level the limit on your results moves to targeting and copy rather than infrastructure, and the job becomes holding the setup steady as volume grows.

50 to 79

Usually one heavy item is missing, most often warmup or DKIM. A setup like this works at low volume and fails as you scale, which is the hardest pattern to diagnose because the early days look fine.

Below 50

Several foundations are absent at once. Sending cold volume now puts the domain itself at risk; close the top two or three items on the fix list before the next campaign goes out.

Working the prioritised fix list

Anything left unticked comes back sorted by weight, heaviest first, with a specific remedy attached to each entry. Work straight down that order instead of picking off the easiest item, because the list is already arranged by how much each gap is costing you.

A few traps are worth checking before you tick a box. A domain may carry only one SPF record, so a second one added by a newsletter tool quietly invalidates both. DMARC counts as published only if the record exists and somebody actually reads the reports it produces. Warmup means a gradual ramp on that specific mailbox, not on the domain in general. A tracking domain counts as branded only when the CNAME sits on a hostname you own, since the default link domain a provider hands out is shared with every other customer on it.

Once the list empties, the question shifts from configuration to consistency. Keep the per-mailbox cap in place, keep verifying new addresses, and treat bounce rate as the early warning that something upstream has changed.