How to Check Email Deliverability Score & 13 Best Tools for Accuracy
How to Check Email Deliverability Score & 13 Best Tools for Accuracy
How to Check Email Deliverability Score & 13 Best Tools for Accuracy
Dec 29, 2024
You hit send on what you think is the most engaging email newsletter you’ve ever created. You are ready to hear from your subscribers. But instead of messages of praise, you hear nothing. Days pass, and still nothing. You can’t help but wonder if anyone even received your email. There’s a good chance your email didn’t even reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Instead, it’s likely buried in an obscure folder or, worse yet, was deleted automatically after being flagged as spam. To avoid this scenario, you should regularly check email deliverability scores. Doing so will help you ensure your emails reach recipients’ inboxes with minimal friction. This article will help you understand how to check email deliverability scores and improve your score to achieve your business goals.
One reliable way to check and improve your email deliverability score is to use Inframail's email infrastructure solution. This tool will help boost your email reputation, reach more subscribers’ inbox delivery, and avoid the spam folder.
Table of Content
What Is an Email Deliverability Score?
Understanding email deliverability brings you closer to grasping email deliverability scores. Email deliverability refers to emails that reach the target recipients’ (subscribers) inboxes. You aim to get the recipients’ primary, social, or promotional inboxes for good deliverability while bypassing the dreaded spam filters. So, an email deliverability score is simply a helpful metric.
It measures how likely your emails will reach the right places. You’ll always want the highest score to prevent your emails from reaching the recipient’s spam folder. We don’t need to tell you how emails in the spam inbox are rarely opened, let alone read.
The Importance of Email Deliverability: How a High Score Drives Engagement, Conversions, and Brand Trust
Needless to say, a low deliverability score tells you that you have some deliverability issues that you’ll need to rectify. Ultimately, your email marketing campaigns could be perfect but ineffective without a high deliverability score.
High scores mean that your campaigns are visible and, thus, much likelier to increase customer engagement. Of course, more engagement means:
Higher conversion rates
Maximized ROI
Reinforced credibility
Better brand-customer relationships
How Is Email Deliverability Score Calculated?
Knowing your deliverability scores is vital; you’ll want to see how you can calculate them. We can’t give you a one-size-fits-all formula, but we can tell you about the factors affecting your scores.
Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation, or score, has a significant influence over your deliverability score, as it reflects your brand’s trustworthiness. You should know that your email service provider (ESP) determines your sender’s reputation. When your sender’s reputation isn’t excellent, your ESPs stop your email from reaching your target recipient.
With that in mind, I must know how my ESPs assign me my sender score: my IP and domain reputation. IP reputation is a measure that assesses an IP address’s trustworthiness based on the number of unsolicited emails it sends. Let’s say your IP address demonstrates high email volume, bounce rates, and spam complaint rates. The result: your IP address will have a poor IP reputation.
Understanding Domain Reputation: How It Affects Deliverability and Long-Term Email Marketing Success
Your domain reputation is very similar to IP reputation - it still evaluates trustworthiness - only with some important distinctions. Spam complaints and bounce rates will still affect your domain reputation, but so will domain age and poor engagement rates. Domain reputation also concerns itself directly with my business’s domain and, thus, takes longer to build than IP reputation.
What’s more, IP reputation is specific to a particular IP address, which makes improving your IP reputation much simpler. I can simply change my IP address. In contrast, my domain address sticks with my business regardless of such changes. Both reputations impact my sender score and, subsequently, my deliverability score.
Engagement Metrics
One of the biggest email marketing mistakes you could make is ignoring your engagement metrics. The engagement metrics listed below will significantly affect your deliverability scores.
Email Open Rates: These rates appear as percentages. They reveal the ratio of opened emails to the number of how many emails you initially sent. Let’s say you distribute 100 emails, but only 40 were opened: you’d have an open rate of 40%.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your campaign’s CTR tells you how many recipients clicked on a link in a specific email.
Email Response Rate: Another percentage for you! These rates reveal the number of emails you sent that got a response from the recipient. This amount is then measured against the total number of distributed emails.
Conversion Rates: Conversion rates measure the percentage of recipients who take a specific action specified in an email. You’d divide my successful conversions by the total number of sent emails.
These metrics show that your subscribers derive value from my emails. When these metrics increase, so will your deliverability score.
Negative Metrics
There are also other metrics that no business wants to see increase. That said, it’s worth knowing what they are, as they also have some sway over your deliverability score.
Bounce Rates: Email bounce rates refer to the percentage of emails that don’t reach their target recipients and instead go back to the sender.
Unsubscribe Rates: These rates show how many recipients opt out of your email marketing campaigns.
Spam Complaint Rates: Spam complaint rates tell the number of recipients who flagged my email as spam.
Email Churn Rate: Churn rates reveal how many recipients unsubscribe from my email list over time.
Authentication Protocols
Email authentication suits your online reputation, reducing deliverability issues and improving your sender’s reputation. Authentication protocols ensure that your emails are legitimate, and there are three significant protocols you should know about.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This protocol verifies that a mail server has the authority to send emails from my domain.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This protocol uses digital signatures to protect my domain from email spoofing. It also prevents anyone from altering an email that’s in transit.
Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): Although a mouthful, DMARC is invaluable. The protocol enables you to identify and prevent email spoofing attacks and phishing scams. It also allows you to tell a mail server what to do when an email fails SPF and DKIM checks.
Related Reading
• Why Are My Emails Going To Spam
• Email Deliverability Rate
• Email Monitoring
• Email Deliverability Issues
• Email Quality Score
• Bounce Rate in Email Marketing
• How To Avoid Email Going To Spam
• Why Do Emails Bounce
• SPF or DKIM
• How To Check If Your Emails Are Going To Spam
• Email Sender Reputation
How to Check Email Deliverability Score & Boost Inbox Rates
Analyzing Open Rates: Your First Sign of Trouble
When your email deliverability suffers, your open rates will take the first hit. Depending on your niche, what appears to be a low open rate might be the norm, so it’s a good idea to compare your results with current email marketing benchmarks.
To calculate a campaign’s open rate, divide the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent (not including email bounces). If your average open rate is below industry standards, it could mean that your emails aren’t hitting inboxes, and it’s time to examine your deliverability further.
Sending a Tester Email to Yourself: The Quickest Way to Get a Read on Your Deliverability
Sending a test email to yourself is a quick, free way to see how your new email campaign looks in the inbox. But be warned—this isn’t 100% reliable because an email in your inbox might also land in someone else’s spam folder.
Using an Email Deliverability Testing Tool: Your Professional Spam Checker
There are many email testing tools out there. These tools scan your emails for:
Spammy content and HTML errors
Check for email authentication
Provide a return path for bounced messages
Checking the Design and Responsiveness: Emails Can Get Junked for Poor User Experience
The way your subscribers interact with your email can also be an influencing factor. You can improve email deliverability by testing for things like mobile responsiveness and how the email looks in dark mode.
Inbox Placement: What Good Is It to Land in the Right Place If It’s the Wrong Place?
An inbox placement tool will analyze the percentage of your emails that reach the inbox or go to the spam folder. Some will even test how your emails will perform with different mailbox providers!
It’s always better to be sure before you hit ‘Send,’ so when in doubt, test, test, and test some more! And use a deliverability tool for that professional validation.
Related Reading
• DMARC vs DKIM
• Importance Of DMARC
• What Is a Soft Bounce Email
• Email Deliverability Checklist
• What Affects Email Deliverability
• Why Is Email Deliverability Important
• Email Bounce Rate
• Fix Email Reputation
• Improve Sender Reputation
• Email Hard Bounce
• Email Deliverability Tools
• Email Deliverability Best Practices
• Best Email Domains
13 Best Tools to Check Email Deliverability Scores
The Importance of Email Deliverability Tools
Email deliverability can make or break your cold email campaigns. You’re wasting time and resources if you’re not reaching your prospects’ inboxes. You should check your email deliverability score before sending cold emails.
This will help you identify and fix any issues that could hurt your deliverability. Then, when you send your next email campaign, you can confidently do so, knowing that your messages have a much better chance of landing where they’re supposed to—in your prospects’ inboxes.
13 Best Tools to Check Email Deliverability Score
1. Inframail: A New Way to Do Email Infrastructure
Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. With Microsoft-backed deliverability and dedicated IP addresses, we help scale their outreach efficiently:
Agencies
Recruiters
SDRs
Main benefits of using our service:
Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Dedicated email servers for each user
16-hour priority support daily
Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects.
InfraMail provides a robust email infrastructure without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you’re:
An agency looking to scale outreach
A recruiter connecting with candidates
An SDR driving sales
Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.
2. Mailtrap Email Testing
An inseparable part of the Mailtrap email delivery platform, email testing is a safe environment to inspect and debug emails in staging before they are sent to recipients. You can quickly validate your email’s HTML/CSS, check how emails render across different devices, and review raw email data.
Email Testing provides you with a spam score for your messages. If you keep this score below 5, you effectively solve many potential deliverability issues.
3. Mail-tester.com
Developed by email software engineers to be cheap, simple, and efficient, Mail-tester.com is a no-frills tool that lets you test email deliverability in one straightforward step. All you need to do to obtain an accurate deliverability score is send a message to the provided address.
This is one of the best email address tester apps to tell you what SpamAssassin, a spam checker developed by the Apache Software Foundation, thinks about your message. You will also learn if your mail account is on a block list or not fully authenticated, among other things. With the free version of Mail-tester.com, you can perform up to 3 daily tests, which should be enough to learn how the tool works.
4. Spam Check by Postmark
Spam Check by Postmark is an easy-to-use online tool that lets you instantly check your messages’ SpamAssassin score. SpamAssassin is an open-source spam checker that uses various spam-detection techniques to separate spam from legitimate emails. Many service providers use it, so knowing how it sees your messages is beneficial in determining their deliverability.
What’s excellent about Spam Check by Postmark is that you can simply paste a message, including its full headers and content, without needing to send it anywhere.
5. GlockApps
GlockApps is a full-featured service that offers everything you’ll need to maximize inbox deliverability, from an email deliverability tester to a blocklist monitor, spoofing detector, HTML error checker, and more. These tools perform virtually all checks marketers use, including sending your IP and domain information against over 50 industry blocklists and tracking if Gmail, Yahoo, or other ISPs block your content or IP.
Thanks to the integration between the two services, all MailChimp users will appreciate that GlockApps allows them to quickly test their marketing campaigns directly from their website. Free users get three detailed reports and can choose between the following:
Annual
Monthly
Per-test plans
6. SendForensics
If you’re interested in generating detailed deliverability reports, check out SendForensics. This tried-and-tested email deliverability checker highlights the issues that send your emails to the spam folder by performing pre-emptive email deliverability testing and real-time scoring for live sends.
You can compare your rate with industry and regional benchmarks to gauge your progress and set alerts to quickly discover emerging issues before they become huge problems that can potentially ruin your marketing campaign.
7. Sender Score
Another tool worth looking at is the Sender Score. It doesn’t consider as many factors as its predecessors do, but it looks into probably the most important ones. Right from their homepage, you can get basic data about your domain. Sign up, and you’ll also see the ratings from the IP addresses you use for sending and related domains. This score is one of the key things spam filters consider when assessing whether an email should be admitted.
8. MX Toolbox
MxToolbox stands out from other email deliverability tools thanks to its wide range of diagnostics for email, DNS, and network performance. It provides detailed blacklist monitoring, sends real-time alerts, and fits nicely into IT workflows.
The platform's holistic approach to managing and optimizing online presence is constructive for IT professionals and businesses looking to maintain a smooth-running email infrastructure.
9. Mailgun Optimize
Mailgun by Sinch is another comprehensive platform offering SMTP-based email-sending services (Mailgun Send) and deliverability tools (Mailgun Optimize). You don’t need to use them as your email service provider – Mailgun’s email deliverability testing tools can be used with any ESP. Like Glock Apps, Mailgun’s Inbox Placement tests let you send an email to a seed list and assess your deliverability to various mailbox providers.
It also offers additional deliverability tools, such as email validation and spam trap monitoring, to improve list hygiene, domain and IP monitoring, and email previews.
10. Validity Everest
After acquiring not one but three popular email deliverability and verification platforms (Return Path, 250ok, and BriteVerify) in 2020, Validity merged these. It launched Everest, one of the most compelling deliverability solutions in the market today.
Validity Everest is targeted to B2B organizations, with the ability to choose whether to include hosting and filtering providers within seedless and have more granular control over how seed lists are weighted.
11. Warmy
While the email deliverability tools we’ve looked at are primarily designed to give you insights into your deliverability, Warmy goes further by helping you proactively improve your deliverability. Warmy is a specialized email deliverability software that can warm up your email accounts and IP addresses. This involves gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a new or inactive email address or IP to build a positive sending reputation with ISPs and improve inbox placement rates.
Using its test mailboxes, Warmy can also automate opening and replying to emails and mark emails as necessary. This simulates real engagement, which can help build a positive sender reputation more quickly than manual methods.
12. ZeroBounce
If you’re looking for a complete solution to take care of every crucial aspect of your deliverability, ZeroBounce is a tool you can’t go past. Its feature set boasts a long list of email deliverability tools, including email list validation, inbox placement tests, email server test, blacklist monitoring, and DMARC monitoring. It’s the only platform on our list to tick all the boxes in our table above.
A few little extras make ZeroBounce stand out even more: you can append activity data to contacts to see their engagement within a specified period. AI-powered email scoring helps to identify the likelihood of reaching a contact. There’s even an email finder to help with your lead generation efforts and a warmup tool to simulate email engagement (similar to Warmy).
13. Folderly
Folderly is primarily marketed to those who send outreach campaigns to new contacts. Its biggest draw is its ability to put your email deliverability program on autopilot. By keeping close tabs on your sending mailboxes and helping to automate the process of “warming up” mailboxes, Folderly enables you to boost your chances of landing in your inbox.
Folderly’s daily sending program provides real-time, in-depth analysis of all aspects of email deliverability, from whether your technical setup is correct to elements of your campaigns that could trigger spam filters.
Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today
What is Inframail and How Can It Help You?
Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. The service provides:
Microsoft-backed deliverability
Dedicated IP addresses
Automated technical setup
We help scale their outreach efforts efficiently:
Agencies
Recruiters
SDRs
The Benefits of Inframail Email Delivery Service
The main benefits of using Inframail's email delivery service are:
Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Dedicated email servers for each user
16-hour priority support daily
Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects. Inframail provides a robust email infrastructure without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you're:
An agency looking to scale outreach
A recruiter connecting with candidates
An SDR driving sales
Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.
Related Reading
• Email Monitoring Software
• Soft Bounce Reasons
• Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce Email
• SalesHandy Alternatives
• GlockApps Alternative
• MailGenius Alternative
• MxToolbox Alternative
• Maildoso Alternatives
You hit send on what you think is the most engaging email newsletter you’ve ever created. You are ready to hear from your subscribers. But instead of messages of praise, you hear nothing. Days pass, and still nothing. You can’t help but wonder if anyone even received your email. There’s a good chance your email didn’t even reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Instead, it’s likely buried in an obscure folder or, worse yet, was deleted automatically after being flagged as spam. To avoid this scenario, you should regularly check email deliverability scores. Doing so will help you ensure your emails reach recipients’ inboxes with minimal friction. This article will help you understand how to check email deliverability scores and improve your score to achieve your business goals.
One reliable way to check and improve your email deliverability score is to use Inframail's email infrastructure solution. This tool will help boost your email reputation, reach more subscribers’ inbox delivery, and avoid the spam folder.
Table of Content
What Is an Email Deliverability Score?
Understanding email deliverability brings you closer to grasping email deliverability scores. Email deliverability refers to emails that reach the target recipients’ (subscribers) inboxes. You aim to get the recipients’ primary, social, or promotional inboxes for good deliverability while bypassing the dreaded spam filters. So, an email deliverability score is simply a helpful metric.
It measures how likely your emails will reach the right places. You’ll always want the highest score to prevent your emails from reaching the recipient’s spam folder. We don’t need to tell you how emails in the spam inbox are rarely opened, let alone read.
The Importance of Email Deliverability: How a High Score Drives Engagement, Conversions, and Brand Trust
Needless to say, a low deliverability score tells you that you have some deliverability issues that you’ll need to rectify. Ultimately, your email marketing campaigns could be perfect but ineffective without a high deliverability score.
High scores mean that your campaigns are visible and, thus, much likelier to increase customer engagement. Of course, more engagement means:
Higher conversion rates
Maximized ROI
Reinforced credibility
Better brand-customer relationships
How Is Email Deliverability Score Calculated?
Knowing your deliverability scores is vital; you’ll want to see how you can calculate them. We can’t give you a one-size-fits-all formula, but we can tell you about the factors affecting your scores.
Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation, or score, has a significant influence over your deliverability score, as it reflects your brand’s trustworthiness. You should know that your email service provider (ESP) determines your sender’s reputation. When your sender’s reputation isn’t excellent, your ESPs stop your email from reaching your target recipient.
With that in mind, I must know how my ESPs assign me my sender score: my IP and domain reputation. IP reputation is a measure that assesses an IP address’s trustworthiness based on the number of unsolicited emails it sends. Let’s say your IP address demonstrates high email volume, bounce rates, and spam complaint rates. The result: your IP address will have a poor IP reputation.
Understanding Domain Reputation: How It Affects Deliverability and Long-Term Email Marketing Success
Your domain reputation is very similar to IP reputation - it still evaluates trustworthiness - only with some important distinctions. Spam complaints and bounce rates will still affect your domain reputation, but so will domain age and poor engagement rates. Domain reputation also concerns itself directly with my business’s domain and, thus, takes longer to build than IP reputation.
What’s more, IP reputation is specific to a particular IP address, which makes improving your IP reputation much simpler. I can simply change my IP address. In contrast, my domain address sticks with my business regardless of such changes. Both reputations impact my sender score and, subsequently, my deliverability score.
Engagement Metrics
One of the biggest email marketing mistakes you could make is ignoring your engagement metrics. The engagement metrics listed below will significantly affect your deliverability scores.
Email Open Rates: These rates appear as percentages. They reveal the ratio of opened emails to the number of how many emails you initially sent. Let’s say you distribute 100 emails, but only 40 were opened: you’d have an open rate of 40%.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your campaign’s CTR tells you how many recipients clicked on a link in a specific email.
Email Response Rate: Another percentage for you! These rates reveal the number of emails you sent that got a response from the recipient. This amount is then measured against the total number of distributed emails.
Conversion Rates: Conversion rates measure the percentage of recipients who take a specific action specified in an email. You’d divide my successful conversions by the total number of sent emails.
These metrics show that your subscribers derive value from my emails. When these metrics increase, so will your deliverability score.
Negative Metrics
There are also other metrics that no business wants to see increase. That said, it’s worth knowing what they are, as they also have some sway over your deliverability score.
Bounce Rates: Email bounce rates refer to the percentage of emails that don’t reach their target recipients and instead go back to the sender.
Unsubscribe Rates: These rates show how many recipients opt out of your email marketing campaigns.
Spam Complaint Rates: Spam complaint rates tell the number of recipients who flagged my email as spam.
Email Churn Rate: Churn rates reveal how many recipients unsubscribe from my email list over time.
Authentication Protocols
Email authentication suits your online reputation, reducing deliverability issues and improving your sender’s reputation. Authentication protocols ensure that your emails are legitimate, and there are three significant protocols you should know about.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This protocol verifies that a mail server has the authority to send emails from my domain.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This protocol uses digital signatures to protect my domain from email spoofing. It also prevents anyone from altering an email that’s in transit.
Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): Although a mouthful, DMARC is invaluable. The protocol enables you to identify and prevent email spoofing attacks and phishing scams. It also allows you to tell a mail server what to do when an email fails SPF and DKIM checks.
Related Reading
• Why Are My Emails Going To Spam
• Email Deliverability Rate
• Email Monitoring
• Email Deliverability Issues
• Email Quality Score
• Bounce Rate in Email Marketing
• How To Avoid Email Going To Spam
• Why Do Emails Bounce
• SPF or DKIM
• How To Check If Your Emails Are Going To Spam
• Email Sender Reputation
How to Check Email Deliverability Score & Boost Inbox Rates
Analyzing Open Rates: Your First Sign of Trouble
When your email deliverability suffers, your open rates will take the first hit. Depending on your niche, what appears to be a low open rate might be the norm, so it’s a good idea to compare your results with current email marketing benchmarks.
To calculate a campaign’s open rate, divide the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent (not including email bounces). If your average open rate is below industry standards, it could mean that your emails aren’t hitting inboxes, and it’s time to examine your deliverability further.
Sending a Tester Email to Yourself: The Quickest Way to Get a Read on Your Deliverability
Sending a test email to yourself is a quick, free way to see how your new email campaign looks in the inbox. But be warned—this isn’t 100% reliable because an email in your inbox might also land in someone else’s spam folder.
Using an Email Deliverability Testing Tool: Your Professional Spam Checker
There are many email testing tools out there. These tools scan your emails for:
Spammy content and HTML errors
Check for email authentication
Provide a return path for bounced messages
Checking the Design and Responsiveness: Emails Can Get Junked for Poor User Experience
The way your subscribers interact with your email can also be an influencing factor. You can improve email deliverability by testing for things like mobile responsiveness and how the email looks in dark mode.
Inbox Placement: What Good Is It to Land in the Right Place If It’s the Wrong Place?
An inbox placement tool will analyze the percentage of your emails that reach the inbox or go to the spam folder. Some will even test how your emails will perform with different mailbox providers!
It’s always better to be sure before you hit ‘Send,’ so when in doubt, test, test, and test some more! And use a deliverability tool for that professional validation.
Related Reading
• DMARC vs DKIM
• Importance Of DMARC
• What Is a Soft Bounce Email
• Email Deliverability Checklist
• What Affects Email Deliverability
• Why Is Email Deliverability Important
• Email Bounce Rate
• Fix Email Reputation
• Improve Sender Reputation
• Email Hard Bounce
• Email Deliverability Tools
• Email Deliverability Best Practices
• Best Email Domains
13 Best Tools to Check Email Deliverability Scores
The Importance of Email Deliverability Tools
Email deliverability can make or break your cold email campaigns. You’re wasting time and resources if you’re not reaching your prospects’ inboxes. You should check your email deliverability score before sending cold emails.
This will help you identify and fix any issues that could hurt your deliverability. Then, when you send your next email campaign, you can confidently do so, knowing that your messages have a much better chance of landing where they’re supposed to—in your prospects’ inboxes.
13 Best Tools to Check Email Deliverability Score
1. Inframail: A New Way to Do Email Infrastructure
Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. With Microsoft-backed deliverability and dedicated IP addresses, we help scale their outreach efficiently:
Agencies
Recruiters
SDRs
Main benefits of using our service:
Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Dedicated email servers for each user
16-hour priority support daily
Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects.
InfraMail provides a robust email infrastructure without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you’re:
An agency looking to scale outreach
A recruiter connecting with candidates
An SDR driving sales
Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.
2. Mailtrap Email Testing
An inseparable part of the Mailtrap email delivery platform, email testing is a safe environment to inspect and debug emails in staging before they are sent to recipients. You can quickly validate your email’s HTML/CSS, check how emails render across different devices, and review raw email data.
Email Testing provides you with a spam score for your messages. If you keep this score below 5, you effectively solve many potential deliverability issues.
3. Mail-tester.com
Developed by email software engineers to be cheap, simple, and efficient, Mail-tester.com is a no-frills tool that lets you test email deliverability in one straightforward step. All you need to do to obtain an accurate deliverability score is send a message to the provided address.
This is one of the best email address tester apps to tell you what SpamAssassin, a spam checker developed by the Apache Software Foundation, thinks about your message. You will also learn if your mail account is on a block list or not fully authenticated, among other things. With the free version of Mail-tester.com, you can perform up to 3 daily tests, which should be enough to learn how the tool works.
4. Spam Check by Postmark
Spam Check by Postmark is an easy-to-use online tool that lets you instantly check your messages’ SpamAssassin score. SpamAssassin is an open-source spam checker that uses various spam-detection techniques to separate spam from legitimate emails. Many service providers use it, so knowing how it sees your messages is beneficial in determining their deliverability.
What’s excellent about Spam Check by Postmark is that you can simply paste a message, including its full headers and content, without needing to send it anywhere.
5. GlockApps
GlockApps is a full-featured service that offers everything you’ll need to maximize inbox deliverability, from an email deliverability tester to a blocklist monitor, spoofing detector, HTML error checker, and more. These tools perform virtually all checks marketers use, including sending your IP and domain information against over 50 industry blocklists and tracking if Gmail, Yahoo, or other ISPs block your content or IP.
Thanks to the integration between the two services, all MailChimp users will appreciate that GlockApps allows them to quickly test their marketing campaigns directly from their website. Free users get three detailed reports and can choose between the following:
Annual
Monthly
Per-test plans
6. SendForensics
If you’re interested in generating detailed deliverability reports, check out SendForensics. This tried-and-tested email deliverability checker highlights the issues that send your emails to the spam folder by performing pre-emptive email deliverability testing and real-time scoring for live sends.
You can compare your rate with industry and regional benchmarks to gauge your progress and set alerts to quickly discover emerging issues before they become huge problems that can potentially ruin your marketing campaign.
7. Sender Score
Another tool worth looking at is the Sender Score. It doesn’t consider as many factors as its predecessors do, but it looks into probably the most important ones. Right from their homepage, you can get basic data about your domain. Sign up, and you’ll also see the ratings from the IP addresses you use for sending and related domains. This score is one of the key things spam filters consider when assessing whether an email should be admitted.
8. MX Toolbox
MxToolbox stands out from other email deliverability tools thanks to its wide range of diagnostics for email, DNS, and network performance. It provides detailed blacklist monitoring, sends real-time alerts, and fits nicely into IT workflows.
The platform's holistic approach to managing and optimizing online presence is constructive for IT professionals and businesses looking to maintain a smooth-running email infrastructure.
9. Mailgun Optimize
Mailgun by Sinch is another comprehensive platform offering SMTP-based email-sending services (Mailgun Send) and deliverability tools (Mailgun Optimize). You don’t need to use them as your email service provider – Mailgun’s email deliverability testing tools can be used with any ESP. Like Glock Apps, Mailgun’s Inbox Placement tests let you send an email to a seed list and assess your deliverability to various mailbox providers.
It also offers additional deliverability tools, such as email validation and spam trap monitoring, to improve list hygiene, domain and IP monitoring, and email previews.
10. Validity Everest
After acquiring not one but three popular email deliverability and verification platforms (Return Path, 250ok, and BriteVerify) in 2020, Validity merged these. It launched Everest, one of the most compelling deliverability solutions in the market today.
Validity Everest is targeted to B2B organizations, with the ability to choose whether to include hosting and filtering providers within seedless and have more granular control over how seed lists are weighted.
11. Warmy
While the email deliverability tools we’ve looked at are primarily designed to give you insights into your deliverability, Warmy goes further by helping you proactively improve your deliverability. Warmy is a specialized email deliverability software that can warm up your email accounts and IP addresses. This involves gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a new or inactive email address or IP to build a positive sending reputation with ISPs and improve inbox placement rates.
Using its test mailboxes, Warmy can also automate opening and replying to emails and mark emails as necessary. This simulates real engagement, which can help build a positive sender reputation more quickly than manual methods.
12. ZeroBounce
If you’re looking for a complete solution to take care of every crucial aspect of your deliverability, ZeroBounce is a tool you can’t go past. Its feature set boasts a long list of email deliverability tools, including email list validation, inbox placement tests, email server test, blacklist monitoring, and DMARC monitoring. It’s the only platform on our list to tick all the boxes in our table above.
A few little extras make ZeroBounce stand out even more: you can append activity data to contacts to see their engagement within a specified period. AI-powered email scoring helps to identify the likelihood of reaching a contact. There’s even an email finder to help with your lead generation efforts and a warmup tool to simulate email engagement (similar to Warmy).
13. Folderly
Folderly is primarily marketed to those who send outreach campaigns to new contacts. Its biggest draw is its ability to put your email deliverability program on autopilot. By keeping close tabs on your sending mailboxes and helping to automate the process of “warming up” mailboxes, Folderly enables you to boost your chances of landing in your inbox.
Folderly’s daily sending program provides real-time, in-depth analysis of all aspects of email deliverability, from whether your technical setup is correct to elements of your campaigns that could trigger spam filters.
Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today
What is Inframail and How Can It Help You?
Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. The service provides:
Microsoft-backed deliverability
Dedicated IP addresses
Automated technical setup
We help scale their outreach efforts efficiently:
Agencies
Recruiters
SDRs
The Benefits of Inframail Email Delivery Service
The main benefits of using Inframail's email delivery service are:
Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Dedicated email servers for each user
16-hour priority support daily
Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects. Inframail provides a robust email infrastructure without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you're:
An agency looking to scale outreach
A recruiter connecting with candidates
An SDR driving sales
Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.
Related Reading
• Email Monitoring Software
• Soft Bounce Reasons
• Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce Email
• SalesHandy Alternatives
• GlockApps Alternative
• MailGenius Alternative
• MxToolbox Alternative
• Maildoso Alternatives
You hit send on what you think is the most engaging email newsletter you’ve ever created. You are ready to hear from your subscribers. But instead of messages of praise, you hear nothing. Days pass, and still nothing. You can’t help but wonder if anyone even received your email. There’s a good chance your email didn’t even reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Instead, it’s likely buried in an obscure folder or, worse yet, was deleted automatically after being flagged as spam. To avoid this scenario, you should regularly check email deliverability scores. Doing so will help you ensure your emails reach recipients’ inboxes with minimal friction. This article will help you understand how to check email deliverability scores and improve your score to achieve your business goals.
One reliable way to check and improve your email deliverability score is to use Inframail's email infrastructure solution. This tool will help boost your email reputation, reach more subscribers’ inbox delivery, and avoid the spam folder.
Table of Content
What Is an Email Deliverability Score?
Understanding email deliverability brings you closer to grasping email deliverability scores. Email deliverability refers to emails that reach the target recipients’ (subscribers) inboxes. You aim to get the recipients’ primary, social, or promotional inboxes for good deliverability while bypassing the dreaded spam filters. So, an email deliverability score is simply a helpful metric.
It measures how likely your emails will reach the right places. You’ll always want the highest score to prevent your emails from reaching the recipient’s spam folder. We don’t need to tell you how emails in the spam inbox are rarely opened, let alone read.
The Importance of Email Deliverability: How a High Score Drives Engagement, Conversions, and Brand Trust
Needless to say, a low deliverability score tells you that you have some deliverability issues that you’ll need to rectify. Ultimately, your email marketing campaigns could be perfect but ineffective without a high deliverability score.
High scores mean that your campaigns are visible and, thus, much likelier to increase customer engagement. Of course, more engagement means:
Higher conversion rates
Maximized ROI
Reinforced credibility
Better brand-customer relationships
How Is Email Deliverability Score Calculated?
Knowing your deliverability scores is vital; you’ll want to see how you can calculate them. We can’t give you a one-size-fits-all formula, but we can tell you about the factors affecting your scores.
Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation, or score, has a significant influence over your deliverability score, as it reflects your brand’s trustworthiness. You should know that your email service provider (ESP) determines your sender’s reputation. When your sender’s reputation isn’t excellent, your ESPs stop your email from reaching your target recipient.
With that in mind, I must know how my ESPs assign me my sender score: my IP and domain reputation. IP reputation is a measure that assesses an IP address’s trustworthiness based on the number of unsolicited emails it sends. Let’s say your IP address demonstrates high email volume, bounce rates, and spam complaint rates. The result: your IP address will have a poor IP reputation.
Understanding Domain Reputation: How It Affects Deliverability and Long-Term Email Marketing Success
Your domain reputation is very similar to IP reputation - it still evaluates trustworthiness - only with some important distinctions. Spam complaints and bounce rates will still affect your domain reputation, but so will domain age and poor engagement rates. Domain reputation also concerns itself directly with my business’s domain and, thus, takes longer to build than IP reputation.
What’s more, IP reputation is specific to a particular IP address, which makes improving your IP reputation much simpler. I can simply change my IP address. In contrast, my domain address sticks with my business regardless of such changes. Both reputations impact my sender score and, subsequently, my deliverability score.
Engagement Metrics
One of the biggest email marketing mistakes you could make is ignoring your engagement metrics. The engagement metrics listed below will significantly affect your deliverability scores.
Email Open Rates: These rates appear as percentages. They reveal the ratio of opened emails to the number of how many emails you initially sent. Let’s say you distribute 100 emails, but only 40 were opened: you’d have an open rate of 40%.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your campaign’s CTR tells you how many recipients clicked on a link in a specific email.
Email Response Rate: Another percentage for you! These rates reveal the number of emails you sent that got a response from the recipient. This amount is then measured against the total number of distributed emails.
Conversion Rates: Conversion rates measure the percentage of recipients who take a specific action specified in an email. You’d divide my successful conversions by the total number of sent emails.
These metrics show that your subscribers derive value from my emails. When these metrics increase, so will your deliverability score.
Negative Metrics
There are also other metrics that no business wants to see increase. That said, it’s worth knowing what they are, as they also have some sway over your deliverability score.
Bounce Rates: Email bounce rates refer to the percentage of emails that don’t reach their target recipients and instead go back to the sender.
Unsubscribe Rates: These rates show how many recipients opt out of your email marketing campaigns.
Spam Complaint Rates: Spam complaint rates tell the number of recipients who flagged my email as spam.
Email Churn Rate: Churn rates reveal how many recipients unsubscribe from my email list over time.
Authentication Protocols
Email authentication suits your online reputation, reducing deliverability issues and improving your sender’s reputation. Authentication protocols ensure that your emails are legitimate, and there are three significant protocols you should know about.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This protocol verifies that a mail server has the authority to send emails from my domain.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This protocol uses digital signatures to protect my domain from email spoofing. It also prevents anyone from altering an email that’s in transit.
Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): Although a mouthful, DMARC is invaluable. The protocol enables you to identify and prevent email spoofing attacks and phishing scams. It also allows you to tell a mail server what to do when an email fails SPF and DKIM checks.
Related Reading
• Why Are My Emails Going To Spam
• Email Deliverability Rate
• Email Monitoring
• Email Deliverability Issues
• Email Quality Score
• Bounce Rate in Email Marketing
• How To Avoid Email Going To Spam
• Why Do Emails Bounce
• SPF or DKIM
• How To Check If Your Emails Are Going To Spam
• Email Sender Reputation
How to Check Email Deliverability Score & Boost Inbox Rates
Analyzing Open Rates: Your First Sign of Trouble
When your email deliverability suffers, your open rates will take the first hit. Depending on your niche, what appears to be a low open rate might be the norm, so it’s a good idea to compare your results with current email marketing benchmarks.
To calculate a campaign’s open rate, divide the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent (not including email bounces). If your average open rate is below industry standards, it could mean that your emails aren’t hitting inboxes, and it’s time to examine your deliverability further.
Sending a Tester Email to Yourself: The Quickest Way to Get a Read on Your Deliverability
Sending a test email to yourself is a quick, free way to see how your new email campaign looks in the inbox. But be warned—this isn’t 100% reliable because an email in your inbox might also land in someone else’s spam folder.
Using an Email Deliverability Testing Tool: Your Professional Spam Checker
There are many email testing tools out there. These tools scan your emails for:
Spammy content and HTML errors
Check for email authentication
Provide a return path for bounced messages
Checking the Design and Responsiveness: Emails Can Get Junked for Poor User Experience
The way your subscribers interact with your email can also be an influencing factor. You can improve email deliverability by testing for things like mobile responsiveness and how the email looks in dark mode.
Inbox Placement: What Good Is It to Land in the Right Place If It’s the Wrong Place?
An inbox placement tool will analyze the percentage of your emails that reach the inbox or go to the spam folder. Some will even test how your emails will perform with different mailbox providers!
It’s always better to be sure before you hit ‘Send,’ so when in doubt, test, test, and test some more! And use a deliverability tool for that professional validation.
Related Reading
• DMARC vs DKIM
• Importance Of DMARC
• What Is a Soft Bounce Email
• Email Deliverability Checklist
• What Affects Email Deliverability
• Why Is Email Deliverability Important
• Email Bounce Rate
• Fix Email Reputation
• Improve Sender Reputation
• Email Hard Bounce
• Email Deliverability Tools
• Email Deliverability Best Practices
• Best Email Domains
13 Best Tools to Check Email Deliverability Scores
The Importance of Email Deliverability Tools
Email deliverability can make or break your cold email campaigns. You’re wasting time and resources if you’re not reaching your prospects’ inboxes. You should check your email deliverability score before sending cold emails.
This will help you identify and fix any issues that could hurt your deliverability. Then, when you send your next email campaign, you can confidently do so, knowing that your messages have a much better chance of landing where they’re supposed to—in your prospects’ inboxes.
13 Best Tools to Check Email Deliverability Score
1. Inframail: A New Way to Do Email Infrastructure
Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. With Microsoft-backed deliverability and dedicated IP addresses, we help scale their outreach efficiently:
Agencies
Recruiters
SDRs
Main benefits of using our service:
Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Dedicated email servers for each user
16-hour priority support daily
Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects.
InfraMail provides a robust email infrastructure without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you’re:
An agency looking to scale outreach
A recruiter connecting with candidates
An SDR driving sales
Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.
2. Mailtrap Email Testing
An inseparable part of the Mailtrap email delivery platform, email testing is a safe environment to inspect and debug emails in staging before they are sent to recipients. You can quickly validate your email’s HTML/CSS, check how emails render across different devices, and review raw email data.
Email Testing provides you with a spam score for your messages. If you keep this score below 5, you effectively solve many potential deliverability issues.
3. Mail-tester.com
Developed by email software engineers to be cheap, simple, and efficient, Mail-tester.com is a no-frills tool that lets you test email deliverability in one straightforward step. All you need to do to obtain an accurate deliverability score is send a message to the provided address.
This is one of the best email address tester apps to tell you what SpamAssassin, a spam checker developed by the Apache Software Foundation, thinks about your message. You will also learn if your mail account is on a block list or not fully authenticated, among other things. With the free version of Mail-tester.com, you can perform up to 3 daily tests, which should be enough to learn how the tool works.
4. Spam Check by Postmark
Spam Check by Postmark is an easy-to-use online tool that lets you instantly check your messages’ SpamAssassin score. SpamAssassin is an open-source spam checker that uses various spam-detection techniques to separate spam from legitimate emails. Many service providers use it, so knowing how it sees your messages is beneficial in determining their deliverability.
What’s excellent about Spam Check by Postmark is that you can simply paste a message, including its full headers and content, without needing to send it anywhere.
5. GlockApps
GlockApps is a full-featured service that offers everything you’ll need to maximize inbox deliverability, from an email deliverability tester to a blocklist monitor, spoofing detector, HTML error checker, and more. These tools perform virtually all checks marketers use, including sending your IP and domain information against over 50 industry blocklists and tracking if Gmail, Yahoo, or other ISPs block your content or IP.
Thanks to the integration between the two services, all MailChimp users will appreciate that GlockApps allows them to quickly test their marketing campaigns directly from their website. Free users get three detailed reports and can choose between the following:
Annual
Monthly
Per-test plans
6. SendForensics
If you’re interested in generating detailed deliverability reports, check out SendForensics. This tried-and-tested email deliverability checker highlights the issues that send your emails to the spam folder by performing pre-emptive email deliverability testing and real-time scoring for live sends.
You can compare your rate with industry and regional benchmarks to gauge your progress and set alerts to quickly discover emerging issues before they become huge problems that can potentially ruin your marketing campaign.
7. Sender Score
Another tool worth looking at is the Sender Score. It doesn’t consider as many factors as its predecessors do, but it looks into probably the most important ones. Right from their homepage, you can get basic data about your domain. Sign up, and you’ll also see the ratings from the IP addresses you use for sending and related domains. This score is one of the key things spam filters consider when assessing whether an email should be admitted.
8. MX Toolbox
MxToolbox stands out from other email deliverability tools thanks to its wide range of diagnostics for email, DNS, and network performance. It provides detailed blacklist monitoring, sends real-time alerts, and fits nicely into IT workflows.
The platform's holistic approach to managing and optimizing online presence is constructive for IT professionals and businesses looking to maintain a smooth-running email infrastructure.
9. Mailgun Optimize
Mailgun by Sinch is another comprehensive platform offering SMTP-based email-sending services (Mailgun Send) and deliverability tools (Mailgun Optimize). You don’t need to use them as your email service provider – Mailgun’s email deliverability testing tools can be used with any ESP. Like Glock Apps, Mailgun’s Inbox Placement tests let you send an email to a seed list and assess your deliverability to various mailbox providers.
It also offers additional deliverability tools, such as email validation and spam trap monitoring, to improve list hygiene, domain and IP monitoring, and email previews.
10. Validity Everest
After acquiring not one but three popular email deliverability and verification platforms (Return Path, 250ok, and BriteVerify) in 2020, Validity merged these. It launched Everest, one of the most compelling deliverability solutions in the market today.
Validity Everest is targeted to B2B organizations, with the ability to choose whether to include hosting and filtering providers within seedless and have more granular control over how seed lists are weighted.
11. Warmy
While the email deliverability tools we’ve looked at are primarily designed to give you insights into your deliverability, Warmy goes further by helping you proactively improve your deliverability. Warmy is a specialized email deliverability software that can warm up your email accounts and IP addresses. This involves gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a new or inactive email address or IP to build a positive sending reputation with ISPs and improve inbox placement rates.
Using its test mailboxes, Warmy can also automate opening and replying to emails and mark emails as necessary. This simulates real engagement, which can help build a positive sender reputation more quickly than manual methods.
12. ZeroBounce
If you’re looking for a complete solution to take care of every crucial aspect of your deliverability, ZeroBounce is a tool you can’t go past. Its feature set boasts a long list of email deliverability tools, including email list validation, inbox placement tests, email server test, blacklist monitoring, and DMARC monitoring. It’s the only platform on our list to tick all the boxes in our table above.
A few little extras make ZeroBounce stand out even more: you can append activity data to contacts to see their engagement within a specified period. AI-powered email scoring helps to identify the likelihood of reaching a contact. There’s even an email finder to help with your lead generation efforts and a warmup tool to simulate email engagement (similar to Warmy).
13. Folderly
Folderly is primarily marketed to those who send outreach campaigns to new contacts. Its biggest draw is its ability to put your email deliverability program on autopilot. By keeping close tabs on your sending mailboxes and helping to automate the process of “warming up” mailboxes, Folderly enables you to boost your chances of landing in your inbox.
Folderly’s daily sending program provides real-time, in-depth analysis of all aspects of email deliverability, from whether your technical setup is correct to elements of your campaigns that could trigger spam filters.
Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today
What is Inframail and How Can It Help You?
Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. The service provides:
Microsoft-backed deliverability
Dedicated IP addresses
Automated technical setup
We help scale their outreach efforts efficiently:
Agencies
Recruiters
SDRs
The Benefits of Inframail Email Delivery Service
The main benefits of using Inframail's email delivery service are:
Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Dedicated email servers for each user
16-hour priority support daily
Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects. Inframail provides a robust email infrastructure without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you're:
An agency looking to scale outreach
A recruiter connecting with candidates
An SDR driving sales
Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.
Related Reading
• Email Monitoring Software
• Soft Bounce Reasons
• Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce Email
• SalesHandy Alternatives
• GlockApps Alternative
• MailGenius Alternative
• MxToolbox Alternative
• Maildoso Alternatives
Address
© Inframail LLC. 2023
228 Park Ave S.
PMB 166934
New York, New York 10003-1502
© Inframail LLC. 2023
228 Park Ave S.
PMB 166934
New York, New York 10003-1502
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