How to Check Email Deliverability: Tools and Tips

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Learn how to check email deliverability, test inbox placement, and fix issues fast. Start improving your email performance today.

by Milena Baghdasaryan

Reading Time: 8 min
How to Check Email Deliverability: Tools and Tips
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Email deliverability refers to the percentage of emails that actually reach the inbox, rather than just whether they were sent successfully. It’s different from the delivery rate, which only measures how many emails were not bounced or rejected by the recipient’s server.

A high delivery rate does not guarantee that your emails will be visible to recipients. Many messages with “delivered” status can still end up in spam folders or under promotions tabs, which lowers your actual visibility.

Several key factors influence deliverability:

  • Email authentication
  • Sender reputation
  • Content quality
  • Recipient engagement

Together, these elements determine whether your emails land in the inbox, or the spam folder.

Key Takeaways

  • Email deliverability is a key determinant in the success of an email marketing campaign. 
  • You can check email deliverability by using online deliverability testing tools, checking email authentication records, monitoring blacklists, etc.
  • Both Gmail and Outlook provide dedicated tools for conducting an email deliverability check. 
  • Some of the best practices for boosting email deliverability include maintaining quality email lists, correctly configuring email authentication, personalizing your emails, conducting regular tests, etc.
  • PowerDMARC offers comprehensive email authentication services, leveraging which can help you benefit from improved compliance and higher email deliverability.

Why Checking Email Deliverability Is Important

You can write the best emails in the world, but if they don’t land in the inbox, none of it matters. Regularly checking your deliverability helps you spot issues before they cost you opens, clicks, and conversions.

When your emails get stuck in spam or filtered out, your audience never sees your message — which means your campaigns can’t perform, no matter how strong the content or design is. Poor deliverability also chips away at your sender reputation over time. If people keep ignoring, deleting, or marking your messages as spam, inbox providers start to see you as less trustworthy. Once that happens, it’s even harder to make it back into the inbox.

And there’s the budget side of it too. You’re paying for tools, content, and list management — but if your emails aren’t being seen, that spend goes to waste. Keeping an eye on deliverability protects both your results and your resources.

How to Check Email Deliverability?

Making sure your emails actually reach the inbox takes more than just sending a few test messages. True deliverability testing means looking at how your emails perform across several fronts — from authentication and sender reputation to engagement and bounce rates.

By using the right tools and checking regularly, you can spot small issues before they turn into bigger deliverability problems. The goal is simple: make sure your emails consistently land where your audience will actually see them.

Here are a few reliable ways to monitor and improve your email deliverability:

 

Use Online Deliverability Testing Tools

There are many online email deliverability tools that you can use to conduct a quick email deliverability check. 

  • Mail Tester provides a cheap and easy way to test the quality of your newsletters. Each time you use Mail Tester, it generates a random email address where you can send a test message from your newsletter or email software. Then, you should click on the “Check your score” button, and the platform will give you a spam score. Mail Tester analyzes not only your message but also your mail server and sends IPs to provide a comprehensive report on the quality of your configurations. 
  • PowerDMARC’s MailAuth Analyzer tool helps you analyze email headers to identify gaps in email deliverability and potentially malicious sending sources. It also gives you an overview of your email authentication records, helping you troubleshoot errors and improve your deliverability promptly. 

Check Your Email Authentication Records

For maximal email health, you should regularly check your email authentication records and pay attention to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC status to avoid your email going to spam folders due to authentication failures. 

PowerDMARC’s DMARC analyzer provides domain owners with the visibility they need to protect their domain against unauthorized use (e.g., phishing and spoofing). 

Check if your domain is protected to ensure your next email is safe to be delivered to the intended recipient! 

Monitor Bounce Rates and Blacklists

Bounces occur when emails fail to be delivered. The main types of bounces are hard and soft. Hard bounces refer to permanent delivery failures because of invalid or non-existent addresses and domains, while soft bounces include temporary issues such as full inboxes or server problems. To reduce them, you should regularly monitor and clean your email list to get rid of invalid or inactive addresses. 

When it comes to blacklists, many easy-to-access online tools can show whether you are on a blacklist or not. Examples of such tools include PowerDMARC’s Blacklist Checker and Google Postmaster Tools, which help you monitor blacklists and take action in case you find yourself in them. 

Review Failed Email Reports

When your emails aren’t successfully delivered to the target recipient, platforms like Microsoft 365 or Office 365 typically give an error code along with sending a delivery status notification (DSN). The most common DNS category is the non-delivery report (NDR). A common reason for NDRs is a minor typo in the recipient’s email address. 

In addition to other information, NDRs include an error code about why your message wasn’t successfully sent to the inbox and ways to solve the problem. Carefully analyzing NDRs can provide detailed insights into the current issues and help you identify pathways to overcome deliverability failures. 

Check Your Sender Reputation

ISPs assign a sender reputation score based on the quality of your email-sending practices. To avoid blacklists and have a good sender reputation, you should try crafting content that is engaging, interactive, and relevant to your target recipients’ needs and preferences. You should also maintain a balanced sending behavior and address email deliverability gaps when you notice them. 

Measure Engagement Metrics

Email deliverability can impact other engagement metrics such as open rates, CTR, etc. It can also result in spam complaints and lead to reputational damage if the deliverability rate is too low. Therefore, you should use such metrics to identify, track, and troubleshoot deliverability issues on time. Remember that engagement metrics are often not standalone numbers, but instead, they are interconnected and interdependent as a part of a larger, comprehensive system. 

How to Check Email Deliverability in Gmail

If your organization uses Gmail or Google Workspace, you already have access to several built-in tools that can help you understand how your emails are being delivered. Gmail’s admin features allow you to trace messages, analyze delivery results, and export data for further review. These tools provide insight into whether messages reach their destination, are delayed, or blocked, helping you identify and resolve potential deliverability issues early on.

Here are a few useful ways to check email deliverability directly within Gmail:

  1. First, log in to your Gmail Admin console. An administrator account is required to access reporting features. 
  2. Then, navigate to the Reporting section and the Email Log Search in the Admin console.
  3. The next step would be to paste the message ID provided by the user into the search field. 
  4. There, you can set the date to align with the time frame that’s close to the send date of the email.

Message Delivery Reports

To access message delivery reports and analyze accepted or rejected emails, navigate to the Admin console, select Security > Security Center > Dashboard. You can then click View Report in the message delivery panel. 

Customizing and Exporting Reports

If you would like to customize the reports for an efficient email deliverability check, you can simply use the drop-down menus that are above the graph. These will enable you to customize the reports according to Traffic Source (i.e., whether it’s an External or Internal message), the specific Domain, and Date Range (you can choose between the options of today, yesterday, or for the last 31 days). If you would like to generate a data spreadsheet based on the graph, click Export Sheet, and it will be saved to your My Driver folder. 

How to Check Email Deliverability in Outlook

When emails sent from Outlook don’t seem to reach their recipients, it can be difficult to know whether the problem lies with your message, your settings, or the recipient’s server. Fortunately, Outlook provides several features that allow you to track what happened after you clicked Send. From delivery receipts that confirm successful delivery to detailed error reports and built-in troubleshooting tools, Outlook helps you understand where issues occur and how to fix them.

Below are some practical ways to check and improve email deliverability when using Outlook.

Delivery Receipts

To check if your email was delivered to the recipient’s server, Outlook allows you to request a delivery receipt. You simply need to go to the File menu, select Options, then Mail, and check the Delivery receipt box. In case an email has been delivered, you’ll get a confirmation message on the delivery status. 

Non-Delivery Reports (NDRs)

In case an email hasn’t been delivered, Outlook issues a Non-Delivery Report (NDR), which is the most common type of delivery status notification (DSN). This includes an error code mentioning the causes for the failure, along with suggested solutions and a link to additional help materials. 

Microsoft 365 Troubleshooter

There is a dedicated troubleshooting tool for Microsoft 365 administrators to help identify and address email delivery issues. However, this tool is not available for some Microsoft 365 variants, such as Government or those operated by 21Vianet or in Germany.

Inbox Insights

This automated feature offers thorough, comprehensive statistics for different email service providers, including information related to why emails have fallen in the spam folder. It also provides useful tips for boosting email deliverability.

Best Practices to Improve Email Deliverability

Improving email deliverability is not a one-time task but an ongoing process that requires consistent monitoring, testing, and adjustment. Your email delivery performance suffers from any minor problems that exist in your email configuration, content, or sending methods. Your domain reputation will improve while you reduce spam filter risks when you implement established best practices for email delivery. Your emails will successfully reach their destination inboxes through the implementation of these proven methods.

The following sections present multiple operational methods that help you protect your email delivery performance while achieving better campaign results.

Regularly Clean Email Lists

When your email lists include invalid addresses or non-existent domains, you may frequently experience soft and hard bounces. You should immediately remove invalid or non-existent domains to avoid hard bounces and remove addresses that keep bouncing over and over again to reduce soft bounces. Cleaning your email lists regularly will help you uphold the quality and relevance of the list. 

Using double opt-in ensures your list includes only legitimate recipients who are genuinely interested and likely to engage with your emails.

Set Up Proper Email Authentication

Email authentication can help you reduce the risk of spoofing and phishing and thereby enhance domain reputation and deliverability. Email authentication protocols like DMARC, SPF, and DKIM enable domain owners to authenticate their emails and prevent valid, safe emails from falling into the spam folder. 

You can use a reliable SPF generator to ensure accuracy in your SPF record and leverage hosted DMARC services to ensure your DMARC solution is correctly configured and monitored for maximum security and high email deliverability. 

Personalize Emails and Avoid Spam Triggers

Did you know that spam filters leverage sophisticated algorithms to analyze email content and recipient engagement? Generic messages may negatively impact your email deliverability rate since they might not be relevant enough to engage your recipients; lack of engagement is also a red flag that might result in your future emails being marked as spam. 

Therefore, ensure your emails are personalized, include enough text (remember the 60/40 rule for text-to-image ratio), and are sent in a balanced manner instead of sudden spikes in email volume.

Use a Dedicated IP or Reputable ESP

Try having a dedicated IP address if you regularly send a high volume of emails. Also, choosing a reputable ESP that has a rich variety of email deliverability features can provide you with automation, thorough analytics, comprehensive reporting tools, as well as segmentation and list management.

Perform Regular Deliverability Tests

Various email deliverability testing tools allow domain owners to simulate how different ISPs handle their emails based on factors such as sending patterns and email content.

Final Thoughts

Email deliverability remains an important but frequently ignored element in the success of marketing efforts. Multiple methods exist to check your current email deliverability status, including general approaches and dedicated solutions that Gmail and Outlook provide.

This article demonstrates how to evaluate email performance through practical testing methods while offering established best practices for email authentication setup and performance monitoring. PowerDMARC offers a complete email authentication solution through its free demo, which enables you to access its platform for better inbox delivery of your messages.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good email deliverability rate?

A strong email deliverability rate is usually 95% or higher. Anything lower may indicate issues with your sender reputation, authentication, or content that need attention.

How often should I test my email deliverability?

Perform deliverability tests monthly and after any modifications made to your domain or email configuration. Regular testing enables you to detect problems that otherwise could damage your marketing campaigns.

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