How to Check Email Deliverability?

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Struggling with emails landing in spam? Learn how to check email deliverability effectively, troubleshoot common issues, and improve inbox placement.

by Milena Baghdasaryan

Reading Time: 7 min
How to Check Email Deliverability?
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Did you know that one in six legitimate emails never reaches the intended recipient? Businesses invest weeks and months crafting the perfect email marketing campaign and significant financial resources only to discover that their emails land in the spam folder.

To avoid the waste of time, money, and other valuable resources, it is important to conduct an email deliverability check regularly. Email deliverability measures how many emails you send reach the recipient’s inbox. The email deliverability rate is the percentage of emails successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

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.

How to Check Email Deliverability?

Here are some general tools and methods for checking email deliverability.

 

Using Online Deliverability Testing Tools

There are many online deliverability testing 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. 

Checking Email Authentication Records

You should regularly check your email authentication records and pay attention to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC status to ensure your messages don’t appear in 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! 

Monitoring 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. 

Analyzing Non-Delivery Reports (NDRs)

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. 

Evaluating 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. 

Measuring 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. 

Checking Email Deliverability in Gmail

Here are some tips on how to check email deliverability in Gmail in particular. 

  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. 

Checking Email Deliverability in Outlook

Outlook offers several methods for checking email deliverability:

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

Here are some tips you can follow to improve email deliverability. 

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 is a crucial yet often overlooked factor in the success of marketing efforts. Thankfully, there are numerous ways to check your current email deliverability status, both general ones as well as dedicated, specific methods offered by Gmail and Outlook. 

In this article, we covered various tools and methods for checking email deliverability while also providing best-practice tips, such as regularly monitoring and correctly setting up email authentication. If you are looking for a comprehensive email authentication suite, contact PowerDMARC today and get support for your email authentication and deliverability goals in a single platform!

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