Email delivery checker
Three settings on your domain decide whether your email lands in the inbox or the spam folder. Check yours, or generate the ones you are missing.
- What leaves this page
- Checking a domain looks it up in public DNS, so the domain name you type is sent to a public lookup service. Nothing else is, and generating a record sends nothing at all.
- No account, ever
- No sign-up, no email address, no trial that turns into a bill.
- Yours to use
- Nothing watermarked, nothing limited to a preview.
Check a domain
What it publishes right now, live.
Your mail provider calls it a selector. Google Workspace uses “google”; Microsoft uses “selector1”. If you leave this empty, the usual ones are tried.
This is one of only two tools here that sends anything anywhere: the domain name goes to a public DNS lookup service, because there is no other way to read what a domain publishes. Nothing else leaves the page.
Generate what you are missing
Nothing here is sent anywhere — the records are built in the page.
Tick everything that sends email using your address — your mail provider, your newsletter tool, your invoicing software.
The records to publish
These go in your domain’s DNS settings, wherever you bought the name. Both are TXT records.
Name: @ (or leave it blank)
v=spf1 mx ~allIf you already have one, merge into it. A domain may only publish one SPF record — most mail servers treat two as an error and ignore both, which fails every message at once.
Name: _dmarc
v=DMARC1; p=none; adkim=r; aspf=rDKIM is the third, and it is the one you cannot generate here — the key has to come from your mail provider, because only they hold the other half of it. Look for “DKIM” or “authenticate your domain” in their settings.
What this is, if you have never had to think about it
Most people arrive here having been told they need one of these, without being told what it is. Nothing below assumes you already know.
Why real business email ends up in spam
Almost never because of the words in it. The usual reason is that the receiving mail server could not confirm you were allowed to send as your own domain — so it treated your invoice the way it treats anybody claiming to be someone they are not. Three DNS settings answer that question. Getting them right is generally the difference between arriving and disappearing.
The three, without the acronyms
SPF is a list of who is allowed to send email using your domain name — your mail provider, your invoicing software, your newsletter tool. DKIM adds an invisible signature to every message so the receiver can check it really came from you and was not altered on the way. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks, and asks them to report back. In that order: who may send, prove it was them, and what to do if not.
The mistake almost everybody makes
You may only have one SPF record on a domain. Sign up for a new email tool, paste in the record it gives you, and you now have two — which most servers treat as an error and ignore entirely, so all your email fails the check at once. The right move is to merge the new sender into the record you already have. This checker shows what you are publishing today so you can see whether that has already happened to you.
Questions people ask
Nobody should have to learn what DKIM is.
Messages sets all three up when you connect your domain, then keeps an eye on them — so “is our email arriving?” is a screen you can look at, rather than something you find out from a customer.
