Email Domain Check List: 9 Steps to Ensure Email Domain Health

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

The reputation of the email domain you use to send email campaigns makes it all – it determines whether your messages go to Inbox, get filtered out to Spam, or blocked outright. To score your domain reputation, inbox providers evaluate a lot of different factors, including technical setup and sending practices.

When you get a new email domain, you have to configure it right by adding a number of DNS records. And over time, it’s important to do a regular monitoring of your domain setup and reputation to ensure your email domain is healthy in order to avoid failures in delivering your important email communications.

How to Check Your Email Domain Health

An email domain health is dependent on various elements, which well-coordinated work prevents email delivery failures and increases the potential for the Inbox placement. When an element of this mechanism malfunctions, it leads to failed delivery and opens opportunities for domain abuse.

Find our list of the important steps in checking your email domain health below:

1. SPF Record Check.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) tells email receivers who are allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain. It’s like a whitelist of senders for your domain. If an email is sent from an IP, which is not in the SPF record, it raises a red flag with spam filters.

Therefore, it’s mandatory to publish an SPF record listing all of the email service providers allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain and update the SPF record every time you change the email service provider.

How to Check SPF Record

To check the SPF record for a domain, go to the GlockApps SPF Checker.

Enter your domain name and click “SPF Record Check”.

The checker will return the number of DNS lookups and the SPF record tree representation with allowed IP addresses.

2. DKIM Record Check.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature to outbound emails ensuring the message is not altered in transit. A DKIM record acts as a public key that email receivers use to decrypt the signature and create a message’s hash to match it to the hash created by the sender. If the hashes match, the message passes authentication by DKIM.

How to Check DKIM Record

To verify if your domain has a valid DKIM record, use the GlockApps DKIM checker.

Enter the domain name and the DKIM selector.

You can find the selector in the domain DNS. Look for the DKIM records and notice the value containing ‘._domainkey’ in the Host name field.

The selector will be the first part before ._domainkey.

For example, if the name is default._domainkey, the selector will be default.

Click “DKIM Record Check” to get the result.

3. DMARC Record Check.

DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) connects SPF and DKIM authentications and proves to email receivers that your domain is not spoofed and your emails are legitimate ones.

A DMARC record allows to instruct email receivers on how to handle a message if it fails a DMARC authentication and receive the reports with valuable information about sending IPs and authentication outcomes.

How to Check DMARC Record

To check a DMARC record for your domain, go to the GlockApps DMARC Checker tool.

Enter your domain name and click “DMARC Record Check”.

4. MX Record Check.

An MX (Mail Exchange) record is necessary to direct inbound email traffic to the right mail servers. It’s mandatory to publish an MX record for a domain, which receives email messages. 

If a domain only sends emails, it’s still highly recommended to have a valid MX record on it as email receivers may refuse to deliver a message for safety reasons if the sending domain doesn’t have a MX record.

How to Check MX Record

To check a MX record for your domain, go to the free GlockApps MX Checker tool.

Enter your domain name and click “MX Record Check”.

5. BIMI Record Check.

A BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) DNS record allows senders to add their logo to outgoing emails. A valid BIMI record helps reduce the risk of domain spoofing and increases brand awareness and recognition with the recipients.

How to Check BIMI Record

To check if a domain has a valid BIMI record, you can use the free GlockApps BIMI Record Checker tool.

Enter your domain name and click “BIMI Record Check”.

6. Domain Blacklisting Check.

Domain blacklists are the databases of domains known to send unsolicited emails. Email filters set up at the Inbox providers refer to these databases to identify suspicious domains in the messages. If a message is sent from a blacklisted domain or an URL in the message has a blacklisted domain, the message is likely to be filtered out as spam.

How to Check Domain Blacklisting

To check if your domain is listed in any of the public domain blacklists, you can use the MXToolbox Blacklist Checker.

Go to “Blacklists”, enter your domain name, and click “Blacklist Check”.

7. Domain Hierarchy Check.

An organization may use a number of second-level and third-level domains as a simple and efficient means of identifying particular departments or serving different purposes. A second-level domain is also referred to as a sub-domain. For instance, a brand may maintain a subdomain for email marketing to protect their main domain’s reputation. A third-level domain is the next level that goes after the second-level domain.

How to Check Domain Hierarchy

Ensure all of the domains have trustworthy extensions. For instance, .com, .io, .net, .org have the highest level of trust.

Publish SPF and MX records for the domains of all the levels. A DMARC record may be published for the main domain only. If you want to apply different policies to subdomains or third-level domains, use the sp= tag in the record or publish DMARC records on each domain. A DKIM record is mandatory for a domain used to send email communications.

8. Domain Reputation Check.

An email domain’s reputation is a score that different mailbox providers give to the domain based on its sending habits. That score then determines if the emails are delivered to Inbox or Spam. A lot of factors are taken into account to calculate the reputation score. 

To name a few, the volume of sent emails, sending frequency, the quality of email lists, spam reports, undelivered emails, recipient engagement, etc. are evaluated to give a domain reputation score. The score can vary throughout the domain’s lifetime. 

How to Check Domain Reputation

To check your email domain reputation, use the Google Postmaster Tool. You need an account set up with Gmail or Google Workspace. Verify your domain with Google Postmaster by adding a DNS TXT record and get access to the reputation dashboards. It is to note that the data appears only if the necessary condition is met such as you sent a sufficient number of messages from the domain to Gmail accounts.You can also integrate your Google Postmaster account with GlockApps and have the domain’s reputation data synchronized in real time. The GlockApps Postmaster shows the reputation metrics in a comprehensive dashboard and allows users to quickly see the latest changes in the most important metrics.

9. Domain Deliverability Check.

Brands using email communications to reach out to their clients, subscribers, or buyers should be testing their deliverability to ensure their important messages (transactional, marketing, newsletters, updates etc) reach the recipients’ inboxes instead of being filtered to Spam. 

Email delivery testing is a great way to estimate the potential Inbox placement ratio, optimize email copy for better deliverability, and identify domain configuration issues.

How to Check Domain Deliverability

To check email deliverability for your domain, use the free GlockApps Inbox Email Tester tool. Send a message to the proxy email address and check the report in seconds.

To receive a detailed report about your sending infrastructure and email placement with a lot of different ISPs across the world, create a free account, and run Inbox Insight tests in your account.

Bottom Line

Maintaining your email domain healthy and secure is necessary to achieve optimal deliverability and implement a successful email marketing plan. You can get a clear picture of your present email domain reputation and deliverability by going over the nine essential elements listed in this article.