I've had MXToolbox bookmarked since roughly 2019 and I'd guess a lot of you have too. It's kinda a reflex at this point, right? When something looks wrong with a domain, you paste it in, you get your answer in three seconds. Blacklist check, MX records, SPF syntax, DNS propagation, all of it. It's still excellent for all that and I'm not planning to stop using it.
But I hit a wall with it last year that I think a lot of people hit and don't articulate, so here's my attempt.
MXToolbox tells you whether your setup is correct but it doesn’t tell you whether your email is landing. Those are wildly different questions and I spent a long time treating the first as a proxy for the second.
Let me loop you in on the specific situation: the domain passing every check I could throw at it. SPF valid, DKIM signing properly, DMARC published, not on a single blacklist. Green across the board. Meanwhile our campaigns were landing in Promotions at Gmail and I had no idea because nothing I was using could see inside an inbox. MXToolbox looks at DNS and reputation lists but Gmail's placement decision happens somewhere else entirely, based on engagement and domain history that no lookup tool has visibility into.
So I went looking for a solution. Here's roughly the landscape as I found it.
For the DMARC side specifically, dmarcian and EasyDMARC are the tools you need and both are genuinely better than reading raw XML aggregate reports like an animal. dmarcian has been around forever and has good documentation, EasyDMARC's interface is friendlier and their free tier is more generous. Postmark also does a free DMARC digest thing that just emails you a weekly summary, which is honestly enough for a lot of people who just want to know if something goes wrong. If you're drowning in reports you can't read after publishing a DMARC, any of those three solve it.
Valimail exists too and is more enterprise-flavored, so if you're at a company with a compliance requirement, it might be the fit. For a small team it's overkill so I won't get into it too much.
But none of those solve placement either. They solve authentication visibility, which is a different thing again. You can have flawless DMARC alignment and still be in the spam folder, and if you've never experienced that specific flavor of frustration, congratulations.
Where I wound up for the placement question was InboxAlly, mainly because it shows you where your emails are going between Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and the rest. Inbox, Promotions, or spam, per provider, updated as it runs. That was what was missing in my case. The first time I had it, I could finally see that my Gmail placement was the problem and Outlook was fine, which is information that changes what you do next.
The other half is that it's not just monitoring. It uses seed inboxes that open, read, reply, and take messages out of spam if they land there. So it's actually pushing engagement signals back at the mailbox providers rather than just reporting on the damage. That was what I believe recovered the domain I mentioned above.
Two things I didn't know until I subscribed and wish I had: they've got free SPF and DMARC record generators on their site, and a free header analyzer. The header analyzer is the one I use most now. You paste in raw headers from a message that landed badly and it breaks down the auth results and hop path without you having to squint at it manually. Costs nothing, no account needed as far as I can tell. If you're already doing header shenanigans in a text editor, go use that instead, you're wasting your life.
So my stack now, if anyone cares, looks like this: MXToolbox still for quick blacklist and DNS lookups because nothing beats it for speed. Google Postmaster Tools for domain reputation, since that's straight from the source and free. InboxAlly for placement monitoring and reputation work. Header analyzer when something specific goes wrong and I need to see why.
But anyway, what's everyone running these days? Anyone using something for placement I haven't mentioned? And has anyone found a blacklist monitor they like better than MXToolbox?
I've never seriously tried to replace it, and I'm probably being lazy about it. Drop your comments, cheers!
Source: r/deliverabilitytips · by /u/Aerosaul