Honest limits
What we do and don't claim
Being clear about what a check can't tell you is part of a good check. Here's exactly where the line is.
Four different things
People often lump these together. They’re not the same, and the difference matters:
- Whether your email can be trusted as yours. Can receivers confirm a message really came from you? This is your list of approved senders, your digital seal and your instructions for fake emails (SPF, DKIM and DMARC). It’s exact, it’s public, and it’s entirely fixable. We check this.
- Whether your email setup works. Can your business receive email, and is encrypted delivery set up (MX, MTA-STS)? Also public. We check this too.
- Your sending reputation. How receivers regard your history: how much you send, how often people mark it as spam. It isn’t published anywhere we can read. We don’t measure it, and we don’t guess.
- Whether one particular email reaches one particular inbox. That depends on all of the above, plus what you wrote and each receiver’s own filters, which change without notice. Nobody can guarantee it.
What a perfect score means
That the settings we checked are correct, so a receiver checking whether your email is really from you will get a good answer. It does not mean every email will be delivered, and we will never tell you it does. Correct settings are necessary but not enough on their own. They are, though, the part you actually control, which is why they’re worth getting right.
Things we will never say
- That we can guarantee your emails reach the inbox
- That your email will never be marked as spam
- That a score predicts how many emails get delivered
- That fixing something will bring a specific business result
Anyone promising those is promising something they don’t control. If your problem turns out to be reputation rather than settings, we’d rather tell you than sell you a plan that won’t help.
Where a check can be wrong
We report your settings as they look to us at the moment of the check. A change that’s still spreading, settings that look different from different parts of the world, or a server that’s slow to answer can all make our result differ from what someone else sees. When part of a check doesn’t finish, we tell you the report may be incomplete instead of passing off a partial answer as a whole one.
Two things are educated guesses, and we label them that way: which email provider you use, and a missing digital seal, which is only ever “not found where we looked”, because there’s no way to list every seal a domain has.