Deliverability is a vast subject; you can find more information here. The purpose of this article is to introduce you to some free tools available to help you in the monitoring your reputation as a sender.
Google Postmasters Tools
The tools of type " Postmasters "These tools are intended for email administrators of a server. The Google Postmaster goes quite far in giving you information on the reputation of your sending domain(s), your sending IP's, the number of spamming, etc.
This information does not concern that the Google boxes of your targets, but being one of the main actors of the market, it is difficult to do without it. Especially since there is currently no API for this tool, so no software, even if you pay for it, will give you as good a feedback on your targets using Google as Google Postmasters Tools.
Microsoft SNDS
The Microsoft Smart Network Data Services is also an equivalent of Google's postmasters and gives you a good idea of your reputation on Microsoft addresses. This service offers many tools to monitor your reputation; you have access to the volume of emails delivered, the number of spam traps affected, the percentage of emails moved to spam, etc.
Moreover, unlike Google, it is a tool that has an API, which means that you can retrieve the information to make your own dashboard.
MultiRBL
Blacklists are a key point of deliverability. It is primordial to avoid being listed on it. If some blacklists are of relative importance (being blacklisted by a small Russian actor will probably have little impact for a French sender), others are particularly important. Let's quote among others:
- Spamhaus: THE the most important blacklist. Used by all the big players like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. In short, if you are on it, you have a big problem.
- SpamCopAnother blacklist that sends its list of bad actors based on user feedback to many market players.
- URIBL: Another widespread blacklist on which it is not good to be found
There are (many) other listings and it would be too tedious to check each one. That's why there are tools like MultiRBL (RBL for Realtime Blackhole List) that allow to detect if you are listed in one of the RBL recess and to take the appropriate actions to get out of it.
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DMARC Inspector
DMARC, for Domain-based Message Authentification Reporting and Conformance is a technical specification that supports SPF and DKIM authentication methods. The DMARC record will allow to give instructions to email clients (Gmail, Yahoo, ...) in case of failure of SPF/DKIM authentication mechanisms.
DMARC inspector allows you to check if your DMARC settings are in order, and if not, to see what exactly is wrong.
Gmail message header
The technical header of an email contains a lot of important information, such as all the steps between sending and receiving (a bit like digital postmarks). However, these headers are not very readable for the average person. Gmail has therefore set up a tool which simply translates the information contained in a technical header into a comprehensible form.
Senderscore
Senderscore is a free tool from Return Path. It is a score between 0 and 100 indicating the quality of your reputation. This score takes into account many measures such as the number of complaints, the rate of bounces, the number of spam traps affected, ... If the free version of the tool does not give details of the result obtained, it allows you to have a general idea of your reputation as a sender.
250ok
Those who follow Badsender assiduously probably know that 250ok is our deliverability monitoring tool. It is a very complete tool and... paying. However, 250ok provides some free tools which allow you to do some important check ups, like the status and generation of your DMARC, check your SPF, etc.
