A few years ago, I was helping a client who couldn’t figure out why their emails were landing in spam. They swore everything was set up correctly, but their open rates were crashing. After some digging, we discovered the problem: their SPF and DKIM records were misconfigured, and they didn’t even have a DMARC policy in place. To make things worse, their sending IP had landed on a couple of blacklists.
It was a wake-up call. Email authentication isn’t something you “set and forget.” One small mistake can break your deliverability and make you invisible to your customers.
That’s why I always recommend checking your email authentication setup regularly. Luckily, it doesn’t have to take hours, you can do it in just a few minutes with the right tools.
My go-to tools for checking email issues
Here are my favourites when it comes to making sure your email is healthy and actually landing in inboxes:
- MxToolbox – This is the first place I go when troubleshooting deliverability.
- Use the Blacklist Check to see if your sender IP or domain has been flagged anywhere. Being blacklisted is a common reason emails get filtered out.
- Use the Email Health function to scan your domain’s DNS records and identify issues with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
- It’s like a quick health check-up for your email domain.
- DMARC Tester – Super handy for validating whether your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are set up correctly. It gives you clear feedback on what’s missing or misconfigured so you can fix it before it causes bigger problems.
Keeping an eye on deliverability long-term
Running one-off checks is great, but email health is an ongoing thing. For continuous monitoring, I recommend:
- MxToolbox – You can set up alerts to be notified if your domain suddenly appears on a blacklist or if something breaks in your DNS records.
- Maileroo – Great for real-time monitoring and improving deliverability. It helps ensure your emails stay out of spam folders over the long haul.
Final thoughts
Email deliverability problems can be sneaky. You won’t always know something is wrong until your open rates start dropping. Taking just a few minutes to check your authentication setup today can save you hours of frustration (and lost revenue) later.
If you haven’t done it in a while, run your domain through these tools now. You’ll thank yourself the next time your campaign hits the inbox instead of the spam folder.
👉 At Omnify X, we help brands like yours stay compliant, optimise deliverability, and get more emails opened.
Let’s chat! Contact us here if you’d like a quick audit.