Email deliverability is the ratio of the number of emails successfully received by the recipient’s SMTP server to the total number of messages sent. After you send an email, the subsequent sorting is done by email providers.
And this can only be influenced by improving your sender’s reputation. But before doing anything, it is essential to learn how many of your emails are actually delivered. This will help to plan all the necessary actions.
In this article, we will discuss the best ways to check your email deliverability.
Why it is important to check email deliverability
According to the Validity Resource Center, every 17% of emails worldwide do not end up in the inbox of customers. And out of this number, 11% do not reach recipients at all, while 6% end up in the spam folder.
For a base of several hundred subscribers, this may not be that important. However, for a base of hundreds of thousands and millions of subscribers, this is thousands of missed opportunities and, possibly, lost customers.
In order not to lose your potential customers due to poor deliverability, it is better to check how your letters are delivered right away. The deliverability rate is especially critical for transactional emails in e-commerce.
Even if you have a high reputation on Sender Score and similar services like the SpamAssassin check, you should constantly monitor the email deliverability, as spam filter algorithms are constantly changing.
Email authentication records and email deliverability
Email authentication works like a passport. Email services check for it and decide whether to pass the mailing to the Inbox or not. If you set up authentication, there will be more chances to get into the inbox. Authentication helps the email provider understand who sent the email. And if you don’t send spam, the chances of getting into the Inbox are increased. Performing a quick free SPF checker online can help verify your email domain’s authenticity and ensure your messages are less likely to be marked as spam.
DMARC
Next, it is important to discuss DMARC, which is essential for email deliverability. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance) is a policy to protect users from spam and phishing emails.
It is especially useful if you are doing massive mailing using special services, as well as email automation. In this case, an email provider needs to know that you have allowed the service to send emails on your behalf.
The provider needs to know that letters from your domain are sent by you, and not by some scammer. The mission of DMARC is to regulate this process. It tells the server what to do with the message if the DKIM and SPF records are incorrect.
7 best services to check email deliverability
You have to test whether an email will land into the inbox or maybe spam folder, or won’t get to the recipient at all. To simplify this task, there are special deliverability testing services.
What deliverability checkers test
Such services check email for the same factors as spam filter checkers. These factors are as follows:
- Email content
- Authentication settings
- Domain and IP reputation
- The presence of your IP in DNSBL
Let’s view a few services that can simplify your work on the testing of email
This service checks the likelihood of getting a letter into the inbox, as well as allows you to see how it looks on different devices. Moreover, it checks the content and links in your email, the correctness of the HTML layout, authentication, and the presence of the sender in blacklists.
It has free test access for 24 hours. However, if you want to fully register there, you will need to pay at least $39.
Email campaigns can be tested and checked through the Easysendy Pro service. You can use it for more detailed analytics than email marketing services, test email designs, check the deliverability and reputation of various email services, and test anti-spam services.
It is a very cost-effective offer compared to alternative email marketing platforms — free account if sending to < 2000 recipients, $19/mo for 10000 subscribers.
SendForensics contains a set of products, but the main and most popular for email marketers is testing email deliverability in different providers. The tool allows you to assess the potential deliverability of an email by the main deliverability parameters.
In addition to the above, a template library is available, which you can use even when connecting to the base plan.
If you are looking for accurate and inexpensive tests, this tool fits well. There is a free plan with limited functionality. Paid options start at $49.
Smartlead offers email deliverability testing through its SmartDelivery tests. Users can check the inbox placement of their campaigns just before sending – so if there are any issues, they can fix them in advance.
The email deliverability tool runs a complete deliverability check without affecting real recipients or sender reputation. It helps users:
- Detect whether emails land in Inbox, Spam, or Promotions folders
- Get a spam risk score using filters like SpamAssassin
- Check domain and IP reputation against major blacklists
- Verify SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication records
This makes it a reliable way to improve inbox placement and ensure cold emails reach the right audience from day one.
Mailtrap is a secure email testing tool. When using this tool, a developer or marketer creates a test email account, sets up a server, and sends test emails. All messages are guaranteed to be sent to the test email without spamming real subscribers.
Besides email deliverability, it helps to solve the following tasks:
- Automatic calculation of the spam score of mailings before sending them to real users.
- Checking HTML and displaying emails on screens of different devices.
- Convenient sorting of test messages when working with several projects.
Mailtrap is free. There are paid plans starting just at $9.99 per month.
This checker analyzes e-letters sent from the email marketing platform, issues a report, and then allows you to correct bugs. Also, with the help of this service, a user can make a test mailing to a small segment of subscribers. All deliverability factors are checked, as well as the display of the letter in different mail services on different devices.
The minimum tariff is $45, but its functionality is very limited. Choosing this option, you can only view the type of email and check it for spam. At expensive tariffs, more complete analytics for email campaigns is available
This is the service for checking and testing email campaigns. It provides more detailed analytics than email marketing services, allows you to test the design of emails, checks the deliverability on different email services and the reputation in anti-spam services.
At the initial rate of $79, only the deliverability of emails and the HTML code are checked. All other functions are available on more expensive plans.
Warmup Inbox
Warmup Inbox offers a comprehensive email warm-up solution, simplifying the process of avoiding spam folders, enhancing deliverability, and tracking blacklists. As an early player in the email warm-up space, Warmup Inbox brings a wealth of experience to the table, resulting in a user-friendly platform that seamlessly connects to a network of over 20,000 active inboxes.
With pricing starting at just $12 per inbox, users gain access to continuous email health monitoring, encompassing metrics like spam placement rates, technical configurations (DNS settings, DMARC, DKIM, SPF, etc.), and even blacklisting status. The tool’s integration extends to various email providers and inboxes using SMTP, making it a versatile choice for email management.
Postmasters and email deliverability
Postmasters are analytics services from email providers. There you can view statistics on messages that have already been sent. You can see how many of them got into spam, how they are authenticated, whether delivery failures occur, and how many of them were actually delivered.
Each postmaster gives statistics only about its own emails. For example, in Gmail postmaster, you cannot see the results of letters that were sent using other email providers.
Each postmaster must be registered separately. This is the reason why checkers are more useful – they combine everything.
But still, Postmasters are must-have tools for a specialist who wants to track email marketing analytics. Only there you can monitor the reputation of the domain on time and notice that your emails are not delivered.
Conclusion
On the way of each letter to Inbox, there are chances of getting filtered by email providers. Mail servers and anti-spam tools can think of you as a spammer if you don’t take care of a number of rules. And then the people who expect letters from you will never see them.
Every email that didn’t make it into the inbox is, at the very least, wasted money and spoiled reputation. For this reason, it is always essential to check your email deliverability on time using the discussed methods.
Author Bio
Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Mailtrap, a product helping to test emails at the developmental stages. Apart from writing and networking, he’s passionate about basketball and poetry.
