Deliverability Assessment
- 1. Engagement
- 2. Authentication
- 3. Live checks
- 4. Report
Engagement metrics
Optional, but the more you enter the stronger the verdict. Values are percents, 0–100.
Results so far
Engagement
Waiting for this step.
Authentication
Waiting for this step.
Domain blacklist
Waiting for live checks.
Inbox placement
Waiting for live checks.
How to read your results
Your assessment looks at the four things that decide whether your email reaches the inbox: how recipients engage with your mail, whether your domain is properly authenticated, whether your sending reputation is clean, and where your messages land when tested against real mailboxes. Here is how to read what came back.
Engagement signals
Mailbox providers watch how people react to your email: opens, clicks, spam complaints, and how often you hit dead addresses. Weak engagement, or a complaint rate creeping toward the danger zone, tells Gmail and Outlook your mail is unwanted, and they start routing it to spam no matter how clean the rest of your setup is. Open rate is the noisiest of these signals, since Apple now inflates it automatically, so complaints and bounces carry more weight. Since 2024, Google and Yahoo hold bulk senders to a firm line on complaints, under 0.3% and ideally below 0.1%, and crossing it gets you throttled or blocked.
Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
This is your email’s ID. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC prove a message really came from you and was not spoofed. If any one is missing, misconfigured, or your SPF quietly exceeds its lookup limit, providers cannot fully trust you, and untrusted mail is filtered to spam or rejected outright. A DMARC policy sitting at p=none means you are watching but not protected. Enforcement is now table stakes for anyone sending at volume.
Reputation and blacklists
If your domain or the IP you send from is on a blacklist, most of your mail is blocked or junked before content or engagement even enters the picture. The assessment checks both, because they are different problems. A domain listing usually points to content or list quality, while a sending-IP listing points to your infrastructure or a noisy neighbor on shared space.
Inbox placement
This is the part no configuration check can fake. We route test messages through your real sending setup and measure exactly where they land across Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Gmail, and Outlook. The by-provider breakdown matters because inboxing is not uniform. It is common to sail into Google and get filtered by Microsoft, or the reverse. A healthy overall score with one provider dragging the rest down is a specific, fixable problem, and it is exactly the kind of thing that stays hidden until you test for it.
A snapshot tells you what. It rarely tells you why.
An automated assessment is good at surfacing symptoms. What it cannot do is trace them to a cause. A poor placement score might come from a single misaligned DKIM key, an unfinished warmup, a list that is quietly decaying, an ESP misconfiguration, or reputation you inherited from a shared IP. The fix for each is completely different, and chasing the wrong one costs weeks.
That is the difference between a diagnostic and a diagnosis.
What we do about it
Formula Inbox is a boutique deliverability practice. We take results like yours and turn them into a prioritized remediation plan across authentication, infrastructure, reputation, and placement, then do the work to get more of your mail into the inbox. We are ESP-agnostic, so the recommendation is whatever fixes your problem, not whatever platform we happen to be tied to.
Talk to a deliverability expert about your results
Bring your assessment to a short call. We will walk through what is holding your deliverability back, tell you what is causing it, and give you a clear first move, whether you work with us or not.