At some point, we have all received a bounce-back message, and reading the bounce-back message you may not be able to work out if the issue is with your email/domain or the recipients. You should always contact our support if you are having difficulties with your emails, and our support staff will help your email be delivered.

There are tools you can use even before contacting support. these tools will help you figure out if the issue lies within your hosting or the recipients.

Before we get into the best tools for testing deliverability, it’s important to understand the difference between Deliverability and Delivery.

Deliverability vs Delivery

Email Delivery is in relation to if a recipient’s server has accepted your email or not. If it did, it’s still not certain where a message ended up, but it already counts as a positive result. If a message bounces for any reason (misspelled email address, the domain does not exist, etc.), it counts as a failed delivery, and you are immediately notified of it with a bounce message with have grown to love.

Email Deliverability refers to if an email was delivered to the recipient’s inbox or straight to their spam folder. In that case, deliverability is often referred to as Inbox Placement. There can be multiple factors such as a sender’s reputation, authentications, or quality of content when automatic filters decide when the email is attempting to be delivered.

Now that you understand the difference between Deliverability and Delivery, let us look at four main tools to test your emails deliverability. All you need to access these tools are your browser, there are no installations required.

Mail-tester.com

Mail-tester.com is a free tool for analyzing specific emails and their content. It is extremely simple, you will just be required to send an email to the address found in the middle of the screen, using your email. Once you have sent the email, wait a few seconds then simply click the “Then Check Your Score” button. Mail-tester investigates various factors that affect deliverability.

It checks the likelihood of it going to spam and gives tips on what to improve. It also takes into factor your domain and the authentication methods used with improvements or any blacklists that may be an issue.

Spamcheck

Spamcheck is easy to use, you just paste your email’s HTML code into the dialog box, along with all the headers. Then you will get back a score in just seconds, unlike Mail-tester the lower the score the better. You will also find displayed how to improve the email.

Postmark also allows you to integrate Spamcheck into your mail client and automatically run spam checks on all outgoing emails.

GlockApps

GlockApps emulates email sending through Postfix and two other platforms. It then estimates where your email would land using these services. GlockApps allows you to send test three emails for free. After that you will be required to sign up for a monthly or annual subscription plan, there are different levels of costing and services depending on your requirements.

GlockApps delivers a full detailed report to help you troubleshoot your emails. GlockApps also offers automatic testing, DMARC Analytics, Uptime Monitoring, and Diagnostics all accessible via the user dashboard.

MX Toolbox

Authentications play a significant role in email deliverability. MX Toolbox offers various tools aimed at helping improve the domains’ capabilities. One of them is aimed strictly at validating a domain’s authentication methods.

All that is required is sending a test email to ping@tools.mxtoolbox.com. Unlike the other sites previously mentioned, you will receive an email back to your account with a link to your report.

MX Toolbox also offers the ability to test your domain name and records corresponding with the domain.

The following commands allow you to troubleshoot certain records.  

Conclusion

Making sure all your email is delivered 24/7 is our top priority, we also understand that there are some issues from time to time. Therefore these email troubleshooting tools are such an important factor in having an email account.