Mail-tester: the go-to check for an email account’s setup

As a first check, Mail-tester does the job perfectly. In a minute, with no account, it tells you whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place, whether the server is properly set up and whether it has landed on a blacklist, each time with a pointer for fixing it. Before you email your customers from a new address, it’s hard to find anything simpler.

You just need to know how to read the score. A 10/10 shows that the technical setup is sound, not that your emails are guaranteed to reach the inbox: Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo apply their own filters, which take into account the sender’s reputation and how recipients react. The tool also says nothing about the quality of your contact list or your domain’s history. For an important send, a campaign or a sales follow-up, it’s best to add an inbox placement test on real mailboxes.

A tip to avoid needless alarm: send a real campaign to the test address, not the “test email” offered by your newsletter tool. Those test sends often go through a different route, without an unsubscribe link or a List-Unsubscribe header, and a message that just says “test” loses points on content. The report then reflects flaws your subscribers will never see.

So it is a simple, effective tool whose free version is enough for the vast majority of users: three tests a day is plenty to validate a setup or a newsletter. The paid plans are aimed mainly at agencies and software companies that want to build the test into their own tools.

Two precautions, though. Reports can be viewed by anyone who knows the test address, so don’t send confidential data to it. And purchases are never refunded.