Due to its “black box” nature, email deliverability can seem daunting, scary, and overly complicated to marketers.
It’s not surprising then that many look for comfort and clarity from deliverability tools.
While finding deliverability tool recommendations online is easy, finding ones that are reliable is another thing entirely. Sadly, most tools are either misleading or not as helpful as they seem.
To help with this, I have compiled a list of ten third-party tools that I have used or recommended throughout my years of deliverability work — seven of which are completely free.
And for a bonus at the end, I’ll give you next-step advice on how to take control of your deliverability with tools I can guarantee are already available to you.
Top 7 free third-party tools I recommend
Alright, let’s dig in, and start with the freebies:
1. Google’s Postmaster Tool - Gmail reputation monitoring tool
Google’s Postmaster Tool is one of the few reliable tools that gives you data directly from the mailbox provider.
With B2C senders seeing Gmail representing 40-60% of their lists on average and B2B often seeing close to that as well, the value of this tool should come as no surprise.
Google’s Postmaster tool elevates data based on Gmail users’ interactions with traffic sent from your domain so you are getting data directly from the source itself.
I’ve done a writeup here that helps understand what data is available and how you should start using it (and you should definitely start using it if you haven’t already).
2. About my email - Technical configuration reporting tool
Aboutmy.email is a tool created by email veterans Steve & Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise.
This tool requires you to send a test email to it, but it will then provide a breakdown of the state of key technical configurations for your email that can affect your deliverability experience.
Not only can it tell you if your DKIM and DMARC are active and in place, it can also give you a simple breakdown of what those pieces are in their FAQ.
This is a very helpful tool for both amateur and veteran marketers wanting to check their technical setup for proper configuration.
3. SMTP Field Manual - Bounce code directory
Postmark’s SMTP Field Manual is an attempt to bring understanding and clarity to many providers’ most common bounce-back reasons.
Since every provider builds out their own bespoke bounce reasons and changes them over time, this is not a comprehensive list, but it does include quite a few bounce reasons that will be either directly relevant or indirectly informative to help you better understand any bounce reason trends a marketer may be experiencing.
At the very least, its direct links to many major mailbox providers’ bounce/postmaster documentation is a worthy bookmark to help you in your future endeavors.
4. Hetrix Tools - Blocklist checker
Hetrix Tools provides both a blocklist check and an uptime monitor that allows you to keep an easy eye on your domains and IPs used for sending.
Not only can you check your domains and IPs against well-known blocklists/blacklists, you can also set up free automated monitoring for a select number of domains and IPs.
Whether you need proactive alerting or a place to check when you’re unsure, Hetrix Tools is the tool I would recommend.
5. WiseTools - DNS and authentication checking tool
WiseTools is another tool created by Steve & Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise.
This tool can be used to manually check particular DNS records to see if they are active and accessible publicly. For this, you will need to know the exact DNS record type and related hosting information to check, but it will allow you to see if those records are active and accessible for the internet at large.
I use this every day, especially for investigating/verifying authentication setups.
6. Socketlabs’ DKIM/DMARC generator - DKIM/DMARC generating tool
Socketlabs has several different free and paid tools available that all seem great, but I especially wanted to point out their DKIM/DMARC generator.
This tool allows you to generate custom DKIM or DMARC records for your domain at no cost. This is especially helpful to those who have more customized setups/platforms that don’t generate such records for them, at least as far as DKIM is concerned.
Whether you just need a placeholder DMARC record to be Yahoogle compliant or a custom DKIM key pair generated for authenticating email traffic, Socketlabs’ generator helps you acquire those necessary records with ease and simplicity.
7. BIMI inspector/generator - BIMI inspecting/generating tool
The BIMI group (who headed up BIMI, a newer deliverability element) has provided a free tool that helps you either troubleshoot, check, or outright generate the necessary DNS records for your BIMI setup.
BIMI has a few extra caveats and complications for its setup so their resource center is also very helpful for anyone either interested in or troubleshooting an issue with their BIMI setup.
For BIMI assistance, there’s nothing like being able to go to the source, especially since it’s free.
Top 3 paid third-party tools I recommend
As we move from the free to the paid, I want to make this very clear—it is entirely possible for a marketer to have strong, effective inboxing without paying for a third-party service (other than their email-sending platform, of course).
With that said, there are specific situations where paid tools can help either resolve or assist with deliverability concerns.
The following recommendations are some of the best options that I would recommend based on either my direct experience or their respectability within the email industry:
1. Valimail’s DMARC monitoring support - Services and tools for DMARC support
Valimail provides DMARC support that helps streamline and simplify a process that, if done incorrectly on your own, could cause real problems for all of your company’s email streams.
While setting up DMARC can be done for free, monitoring and processing the reports can be a headache, especially if you are trying to ramp up your domain’s security pretty quickly with low impact on legitimate mail streams.
In these scenarios, DMARC support is worth it, and Valimail can fulfill that support need.
2. Glockapps seed-list tests - Inbox-placement test tool
Glockapps offers a range of tools from IP blocklist or domain uptime monitors to content checks, but the main thing they’re known for is their seed-list inbox tests.
While all seed-list testing is limited in its reliability due to the inorganic nature of such tests, Glockapps offers an array of seeds from around the world that can help a marketer troubleshoot inboxing issues at many different providers.
If you’re unsure of your inbox placement rates, Glockapps seems to stand out as the ideal paid tool for helping you troubleshoot such worries.
3. Kickbox email verification - Email verification tool
Kickbox’s email verification tool helps you identify inactive or misspelled email addresses to remove them before ever sending to them.
While such tools are not foolproof and cannot help with finding spam-trap addresses, they can be helpful in situations where a list has gone uncontacted for a long period of time and you want to take whatever action possible to clean the list before attempting to re-engage.
If you don’t have the luxury of knowing the health of your list due to a lack of traffic consistency or list-maintenance efforts, then Kickbox’s tool can help you begin that journey on the right foot.
The most important tool is the one at your fingertips
As a deliverability expert, I use many of the free tools I listed above on a regular basis. They help me properly troubleshoot and verify my efforts so that I can be confident in my work.
With that said, the greatest tool I use even more than these is the organic email metrics in the sending platform itself.
Every marketer has a lot of the data they need already available to them in their sending platform. All it takes is some time and practice.
If you are looking to grow your understanding of your email metrics, you can start with any one of the resources I’ve written, but here are a few that I would recommend starting with:
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