5 practical steps to check on your email deliverability

I was getting ready to send the latest issue of The Krehbiel Report, and when I’m getting ready to send a message I like to send it to different accounts to make sure it displays properly. I sent a test message to my protonmail address, and I got this message.

“This email has failed its domain’s authentication requirements. It may be spoofed or improperly forwarded.”

Yikes.

That surprised me, because I had worked with the DNS experts at my hosting company to make sure everything was set up correctly to send email from my account. It turned out there was an additional step I had to take with Mailchimp, and I wouldn’t have known about it unless I had sent the email to protonmail.

Here are five practical steps you can do to check on the status of your email sends.

1. Have a DNS expert review the settings on your domain. I hope you did that a long time ago, but there’s no harm in checking.
2. Look at the reports you get from your ESP. They can give you insights into things that might be wrong.
3. Seed your campaigns with test emails on a bunch of different platforms and make sure they’re all getting into the inbox.
4. Use mail-tester.com. It will generate a test email address for you. Send to that email address, and it will give you a report on what might be wrong with your messages.
5. Check your domain’s reputation at senderscore.org.

Sometimes these services ding you for dumb stuff. It’s the same with Google’s page-speed checker, and similar services.

Don’t get too panicked about every little thing. But where you can, take their suggestions.

For example, mail-tester.com recommended I add alt tags to my images. That’s an easy fix, and it bumps up my rating a touch. So why not?

Sources

mail-tester.com
senderscore.org
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