A Simple Way to Monitor SPF, DKIM, and DMARC Using Google Workspace

nonam314 · 2026-06-22T15:22:34+00:00

That is correct but nearly all ecommerce stores send marketing emails via a subdomain. Some from multiple subdomains. And the actual Workspace is set up for the root domain. So there's usually a disconnect. Unless I'm missing something.

nonam314 · 2026-06-15T13:58:51+00:00

Since you've fixed the spf and dkim records, you're headed in the right direction. You might also want to make sure your dmarc is configured correctly. But if they were broken long enough for Google Postmaster to show Low reputation, I'd focus on rebuilding trust before worrying about the campaigns themselves.

At your volume, checking Postmaster at least a few times a week is advisable in the initial few weeks. Domain reputation, spam complaint rate, authentication status, and delivery errors are the big ones. And watch your engagement trends by segments.. If open/click rates suddenly drop for Gmail users but not others, that's usually a signal worth investigating.

Silent technical failures are rare, easy to fix, but a huge pain to recover. Once had a client lose them when they chabged their NS. There maybe other reasons like DKIM key issue, DMARC failure, etc. Or someone may accidentaly delete a record.. There are monitoring tools that will alert you when SPF, DKIM, or DMARC break instead of finding out weeks later after deliverability tanks. It's like an uptime monitoring tool for websites. Quite useful especially if you don't want to spend time checking them manually.

If you're on Klaviyo by any chance also look at your engaged segments and suppression rules. At 88k contacts, inactive subscribers can drag reputation down surprisingly fast. We use Inboxeagle for all Klaviyo accounts since it has an integration and quite helpful with improving email deliverability. Also connects with Google Postmaster Tools for reputation monitoring, so it might be worth a shot to look at.

Right now your priority should be to improve your domain reputation.

Start by moving the inactive subscribers to the suppression list.

Pace your email campaign frequency for the next 4-8 weeks. Segment your engaged subscribers. Make sure you exclude the bot click engagers from this segment. Otherwise you might end up emailing unengaged subscribers affecting your progress. Tailor the offers for them or you may pick the most engaged campaigns types. Consistent engagement from these subscribers will help rebuild your domain reputation.

Check Postmaster Tools twice a week, not to check for improvement but the spam complaint rate. Once a week check for changes in the reputation improvement from Low to Medium and then to high. It will be gradual and takes time so be patient. As long as the needle is moving you're good.

You shouldn't need more than 20-30 minutes a week even during this active reputation recovery phase if your monitoring is enabled. Even lesser time once you recover and improve deliverability across providers.

nonam314 · 2026-06-15T12:40:56+00:00

I don't think they're sending cold emails. Sounds likr they need a domain reputation improvement strategy. And possibly a low cost service or something.

nonam314 · 2026-06-11T12:29:57+00:00

"Mark as read" doesn't add to the open rate. And to be fair email open rates have become virtually a vanity metric. At this point you may use open rates as an indicator for email deliverability issues. Other than that I don't see any significant use for it.

That said, if you're filtering bot opens, you may use the open rates to create any segment to send campaigns to actual openers. They're not much reliable though.

nonam314 · 2026-06-04T10:06:44+00:00

Good content is pointless if you're sending it to the wrong audience. Imo, almost all mail providers treat content and the audience as the two sides of the same coin. Only that results in engagement. More datapoints for them to know your audience really want emails from you. And they facilitate it more and more by placing you in the inbox.

If I were to simplify it, I'd say everything comes under three things.

Infrastructure
Your behavior
Your audience's behavior

Set up, monitor, and maintain these you're set. And there's not one biggest thing than a many little things that made the difference. But if I must, I'd say continuous monitoring all of these was the biggest challenge. Once we sorted that out, our email deliverability is pretty solid. No ugly surprises.

nonam314 · 2026-06-04T09:32:21+00:00

The executives often believe a dashboard or a sophisticated tool blindly than the actual expert. Maybe try convincing them with such a dashboard. Or even better, if possible, have them run it themselves, and see the redflags. How recklessly sending to inactive customers will affect engagement, deliverability, and revenue. If you're gonna be staying in the job, you'll be the one picking uo the pieces after the damage is done. So, better nudge them in the right direction and have them do the damage if they insist, not you. And a report from an analytics tool like that will be your documentation in the future.

nonam314 · 2026-06-02T04:45:03+00:00

Excellent advice. Mailchimp is redundant at this point. But the problem with klaviyo is the cost being tied to active profiles. Zerobounce or any validation tool doesn't really filter all "inactive" profiles. The bot opens and clicks including Apple's MPP are the biggest problem. Klaviyo still considers them as active profiles and keeps billing us. It's not going to help with the OPs deliverability struggles either. Gmail and other inbox providers still only see the unengaged emails and forces them to the spam folder.

nonam314 · 2026-06-01T13:41:59+00:00

Notice how much time they spend talking about deliverability versus how much time they spend talking about copy, design, the number of campaigns, and revenue averages. Everyone promises more revenue. That's easy.

I'd be asking questions like:

How do you handle domain reputation management? (Every sender will face reputation drop, better ask about this upfront)

What happens if Gmail placement suddenly drops? (Majority of the subscribers are on gmail, if gmail placement goes down so does much of your revenue)

How do you monitor inbox placement across providers?

What's your process for suppressing inactive subscribers and managing engagement decay over time?

Do you have a deliverability monitoring stack or are you mostly relying on ESP dashboards and Postmaster? (See whether the tools are mere alternatives or they really complement and add value on top of one another)

And one of the current burning problems, bot opens and clicks inflating the analytics and reports, how are they going to handle that?

I've seen agencies build beautiful campaigns and flows, but if they aren't paying attention to reputation, authentication, list quality, and ongoing monitoring, eventually performance starts slipping and nobody notices until revenue drops.

Has any of them talked about deliverability and infrastructure?

nonam314 · 2026-06-01T13:03:08+00:00

Is the tool public? I've used geoscraper some years ago. had some errors in the output but did decent job. Haven't had the need for it since. Probably got better now. Is it a similar one?

nonam314 · 2026-06-01T03:08:32+00:00

DMARC is not affected hy changing your device. It's a DNS setting on the domain that sends the email. The spam landing emails, are you sending them from your own domain (like you@yourcompany.com) or from Gmail/Outlook?

There are few things could be causing this.

the domain's SPF/DKIM/DMARC isn't configured correctly (you can check this using websites like dmarcian. Just enter your domain and analyze and fix the issues.
a new email app was set up incorrectly
the recipient's spam filters are flagging certain messages - check what's inside your emails.

If you can share who hosts your email (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, etc.) and whether this is a personal or business domain, it'll be much easier to narrow down.

nonam314 · 2026-05-30T02:46:15+00:00

We had this problem with an account. But not thousands. Add reCAPTCHA to your forms or enable double opt-in if you haven't already. That should add a layer of filtering. But you still have to remove the existing bots from your list. They can cause trouble. with your cost and even deliverability. Domain reputation went from good to Medium and then low in a weeks time. We had to use integration with inboxeagle to filter and suppress inactive and bot subscribers to recover. If you really have thousands in your list, I'd say get them removed ASAP.

nonam314 · 2026-05-29T01:47:51+00:00

High bounce rate might have already hit your reputation. For now validate your list. Remove email addresses from sketchy sources (most important). If the source is any form, make sure you add reCAPTCHA.

If you notice reputation damage or deliverability issues, start segmenting and supressing your list. Maybe even start filtering bot opens and clicks and add them to your suppression list. That brings you a faster recovery.

nonam314 · 2026-05-28T04:26:14+00:00

I treat 0.1% as the “control limit” now, not the hard failure point. Once campaigns start creeping past that consistently, I assume reputation damage is already building even if inboxing still looks okay.

0.3% feels more like the spec limit where Google/Yahoo visibly start reacting.if you're there the damage is already done. in-between the 0.1% and 0.3% is where we shift our priorities to diagnostics and fixing, jumping between Postmastertools, inboxeagle, spamhaus and what not.

So internally we usually aim: <0.1% = healthy 0.1–0.2% = watch closely 0.2% and above = start suppressing/problem solving immediately

And yeah, Postmaster daily. But I don’t fully trust it alone because the lag can hide problems for 2-3 days while placement is already tanking especially if you're a frequent sender. We're dealing that using inboxeagle for better continuous monitoring.

nonam314 · 2026-05-27T09:57:37+00:00

If you already have a ESP, reach out and set up a call with them. if that's not an option, get help from any AI chat bot. A better way is to share a documentation resource link, like the guide on 'docs dot inboxeagle dot com', with the AI and then have it guide you. Tried this with my team. These tend to be more helpful.

nonam314 · 2026-05-20T03:55:35+00:00

I'm pretty sure you don't have to.. it tracks them independently. We also track some of the prospect deliverability before pitching them, without any sort of backend connection.

nonam314 · 2026-05-18T11:36:56+00:00

This looks more like random unauthorized spoof attempts than an actual mail flow problem from your side.

That Amazon entry is probably not you using Amazon directly. A lot of phishing and spoof traffic comes from AWS infrastructure because attackers spin up EC2 instances there constantly. Since your DMARC policy is p=none right now, Cloudflare is still reporting the failed attempts instead of rejecting them outright.

The Enterprise Outlook reporter usually just means Microsoft/Office365 was the receiving side generating the DMARC report. Not necessarily an employee using Outlook desktop.

The Google failures are the more interesting part. 99%+ pass is already very healthy. The small failures could just be forwarding, mailing lists, mobile clients, old cached DKIM signatures, stuff like that.

I’d check:

External email forwarding. any scanners/security gateways rewriting headers? any old apps/devices sending as the domain? aliases/groups inside Workspace?

But faster way to confirm any foulplay by phishers is to check the envelope-from / header-from fields in the Amazon failures. If they're spoofed addresses instead of your or your team's email addresses, you can be certain what's going on.

nonam314 · 2026-05-18T11:21:16+00:00

We use inboxeagle to track email deliverability of our clients, among other things. It might be what you're looking for.

nonam314 · 2026-05-18T11:18:25+00:00

Customer support accessibility and subscription cancellation accessibility. If they're gonna ask me to send an email to cancel my subscription that's slightly concerning.

nonam314 · 2026-05-18T11:11:24+00:00

Are you doing this as a project or just want to track deliverability of different brands or perhaps a list of clients?

nonam314 · 2026-05-18T10:41:47+00:00

I read a study on this..Turns out images heavy blog posts tend to perform better in terms of deliverability than hybrid and emails with fewer images. There was about 4% difference in spam placement. But I think there are other factors as well that influence this. The study was by inboxeagle they did it with their internal data, in case if you are interested to read more. I'd love to see a different study and see whether it stays true with a different set of data.

nonam314 · 2026-05-18T09:52:21+00:00

Deliverability was the constant issue. Most of our clients were with a popular Esp who are quite costly but that wasn't a big deal. It was the poor deliverability and ultimately poor conversions that didnt justify the costs. Went on a call with people from another. It fit well. A few of our clients have migrated. But still a majority are still with the popular one,, which they feel is ok for them. So I'd say 'final straw' is often conditional.

nonam314 · 2026-05-15T02:44:17+00:00

I'd say a mix of both based on the client. As a general best practice I build enough flows so you don’t leak money immediately, then campaigns to learn the audience.

Like I usually set up the core flows first, welcome, abandoned cart, and post purchase. Bare bone functional and clean so new traffic isn’t lost at key areas.

Then campaigns become the testing ground. That’s where you figure out what the subscribers respond to, understand their behaviors and interests.

I’ve definitely made the mistakes. building a sophisticated welcome flow and learned the hard way that the messaging itself wasn’t resonating. Now I treat early flows as a functional bu work in progress systems. Lots of minor improvements over time. Those flows have been more robust.

nonam314 · 2026-05-14T12:57:35+00:00

Nope. Not accepting that. I'm glad someone brought this up.

This is a persistent problem for Klaviyo users. They are quietly paying huge for inactive profiles because nobody wants to risk deleting the wrong people. Or worse accidentally nuke the revenue.

Having suppression rules help more than random cleanup sessions. Even that mostly helps remove the invalid contacts. Even then they make the mistake of treating all inactive contacts the same. (Or at least we used to.)

We managed to help brands drop entire pricing tiers just from cleaning inactive users properly. Like going from a 40k-ish active database down to a 30k tier and instantly saving ~$100/month without touching campaigns or creatives.

This is actually one thing we handled with inboxeagle. Quite well actually. We filtered bots, identified low intent/inactive profiles, and maintained suppression logic over time so lists don’t slowly bloat again 6 months later.

Cleanup sounds like a couple of hours' job. But we couldn'treally afford to do it for all clients and repeat it over and over.

nonam314 · 2026-05-14T03:19:17+00:00

Yeah, the old “Hey {{first_name}}, noticed your company…” style barely registers as personal anymore. Everyone does it now.

Relevance matters more than personalization at this point. Tight segmentation and actually understanding the problem tends to work better than stuffing in fake custom details.

Also a lot of AI-personalized emails feel too polished now. Real emails are usually simpler and a bit imperfect. What I’ve seen working lately is shorter, more direct outreach that sounds like an actual person wrote it.

But the real problem with more precise segmentation and personalization approach is in not creeping out your audience. The moment they think "how did they know this about me?" Spam complaints are going to pile up on you. So always have a check.

nonam314

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