Find out exactly
why mail goes to spam.

Here is the distinction that trips up most senders. Your delivery rate measures whether the receiving server accepted the message. Your deliverability measures whether it landed in the primary inbox rather than the spam or promotions folder. They are not the same number, and the gap between them is where the damage hides: you can run a 98% delivery rate and a 60% inbox-placement rate at the same time, which means your dashboard looks healthy while four in ten of your messages are never seen.

That gap doesn’t show up in the metrics most platforms put in front of you, which is exactly why it persists. By the time it surfaces — as falling open rates, fewer replies, a campaign that quietly underperforms — it has usually been costing you for a while. An audit exists to measure the number your sending platform won’t: where your mail actually lands, per provider, and why. Industry data underlines the stakes: roughly one in six legitimate marketing emails never reaches the inbox at all, and the same campaign can land at around 87% at Gmail while sitting near 76% at Outlook.

Until recently, weak authentication mostly cost you the spam folder. That changed. Since April 2024, Google and Yahoo require SPF and DKIM on every sending domain and DMARC alignment — at least a p=none policy — for anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to their users, and non-compliant mail is now rejected at the door rather than quietly filtered. A misconfiguration that used to mean reduced placement can now mean outright refusal, which is a very different conversation with your customers.

The practical effect is that every sender is being continuously assessed against these rules, and the only question is whether you can see the same scorecard the providers can. An audit is how you read your own grade before it shows up as rejected mail or a placement collapse. It’s the difference between finding a broken DMARC alignment or an over-limit SPF record on a quiet Tuesday and discovering it when a launch send bounces in front of your whole list.

The deliverable is a findings report, not a data dump. Every issue we surface comes with three things: a severity, so you can see at a glance what’s urgent; why it matters, in plain terms tied to your placement rather than abstract best practice; and the specific fix, with a link to the free tool or the page that walks through it where one applies. The findings are ordered by impact, so the first item is the one most likely to be costing you the inbox — not the first one we happened to find.

That ranking is the part a checklist can’t give you. Plenty of audits hand over a long list of everything imperfect, which is its own kind of useless — you still don’t know where to start. Ours separates the finding that’s actually sending you to spam from the half-dozen that are merely tidy-ups, so your effort goes where it moves placement. It closes with a 30-minute walkthrough call, because a report you can ask questions about is worth more than one you read alone and half-understand.

The clearest signal is placement that fell and you don’t know why — mail that used to inbox now landing in spam, with nothing obvious changed. Guessing at that is expensive: you can spend weeks rebuilding a config that was fine while the real cause, a creeping complaint rate or a quiet blacklisting, goes untouched. An audit replaces the guess with a measurement. It’s equally useful before scaling, where a second pair of eyes ahead of a big send surfaces the problem while it’s cheap to fix, and right after a new setup, to check yourself against how receivers actually grade you rather than how the install looked.

What the audit doesn’t do is fix things — and keeping diagnosis separate from treatment is deliberate, because it means the findings are honest rather than a sales pitch for the work. Once you have the report, the path is yours: handle the quick wins with the free tools; have us implement through setup or a migration; clear a listing with blacklist removal; get authentication to enforcement with DMARC deployment; or keep it all healthy with managed deliverability. The audit points; it never pushes.

An audit is non-invasive by design. We work from read-only access or exported data — your sending domains, the IPs in use, a slice of recent accounting logs, and access to Google Postmaster Tools where you have it — and we don’t touch your live configuration or DNS. Because nothing is being changed, there’s no risk to your current sending while we assess it; the worst an audit can do is tell you something you’d rather not hear. We confirm the exact list of what we need before we begin, so there are no surprise requests mid-engagement.

That read-only stance is also why an audit is a safe first step when you’re not yet sure you want a provider in your stack at all. You’re commissioning a measurement, not handing over the keys — and the report that comes back is yours to use however you like, including taking it to your own team or another provider entirely. The diagnosis stands on its own.

Deliverability is unusually high-return work, which is what makes guessing so costly. Every message that lands in spam instead of the inbox is reach you paid to acquire and then lost silently — no bounce, no error, just absence. Lifting placement from the low seventies into the high eighties doesn’t add a few percent at the margin; it can multiply the results of the exact same campaign, because the mail that now lands is mail that was previously sent and wasted. The fix is often a single DNS record or a list cleanup, but only if you know which one.

Set against that, a fixed-scope diagnosis is cheap insurance. The alternative — trial-and-error across authentication, IPs, config and content while your reputation keeps sliding — burns far more in time and lost sends than the audit costs, and often fixes the wrong thing first. Paying once to know exactly what to change, in what order, is the frugal option, not the indulgent one.

There’s a focus cost too. The hours a team spends staring at headers, re-reading sender guidelines and changing one variable at a time are hours not spent on the product or the campaign itself — and worse, scattered changes can muddy the diagnosis, making it harder to tell which adjustment helped. A clean baseline measurement up front collapses that into a single, ordered to-do list, so the team acts once with confidence instead of circling the same problem for weeks.

It’s a diagnosis, not a guarantee and not a fix. It measures where you stand and ranks what to change; it doesn’t implement the changes — that’s setup, migration or managed if you want it done for you, or your own team with the report in hand. And like any honest service in email, it won’t promise the inbox, because placement depends on choices that remain yours: who you send to, how often, and what you say. A perfect technical setup mailing an unwilling list still lands in spam, and the audit will tell you so rather than pretend otherwise.

It also has a firm boundary on who it serves. We audit legitimate, permission-based sending. We don’t assess unsolicited bulk operations, “unlimited” schemes or filter-evasion setups, because there’s no honest diagnosis to give a sending model that’s designed to be filtered — the finding would just be the model itself.