Your sponsors are paying for inboxes. A fixed-scope deliverability audit checks every layer of authentication on your domain, ranks what it finds by impact, and hands you the exact DNS records to fix. No dashboard, no calls, no access to your accounts.
Start an audit ($350)DMARC p=none monitoring only. spoofed mail sails through SPF 9 of 10 lookups one include away from silently failing DKIM 2048-bit good. selector aligned with your ESP TLS-RPT missing delivery failures are invisible to you SCORE 65/100 authenticated but unprotected (example output. type your domain above for a real surface check)
The live check reads your public DNS on the spot: a surface pass, maybe a tenth of the audit. The audit adds your real send's headers, DKIM key analysis, nested SPF resolution, blocklists, and a report with the exact records to paste. Samples: Newsletter A (PDF) or Newsletter B (PDF).
Five minutes: your domain, your ESP, your biggest worry. Then forward me one real send with full headers (I'll show you the 20-second trick).
External DNS checks plus your real message headers. No logins, no passwords, no DNS access, nothing to install.
A scored findings document within 5 business days: every gap ranked by deliverability impact, with the exact record changes written out. Act on it yourself or hand it to whoever manages your DNS.
If you're in the "not a fit" column, don't buy this. Email me anyway and I'll tell you for free what your platform does and doesn't handle for you.
Not by itself, and anyone who promises that is selling folklore. Tab placement runs on engagement and content signals. What the audit fixes is the authentication layer underneath: if spoofing or auth failures are dragging your domain reputation, that damage shows up everywhere, including tabs. Foundation first; the report also tells you plainly which of your problems are DNS problems and which aren't.
No. The entire audit runs from external checks plus one forwarded email. You never share a password, and I never touch your records. You (or your DNS person) paste the fixes.
They handle their half, usually DKIM on their infrastructure. Whether it aligns with your domain, whether your SPF survives the lookup limit, and whether your DMARC policy actually protects you is your half. The gap between those two halves is where most findings live.
Then the report says so, and you have current, documented proof of a clean posture, which is worth showing a sponsor. But roughly two in three newsletter domains I scan have at least one real gap. The odds you're clean everywhere are not in your favor.
Optional, never pushed: larger engagements (multiple domains, deeper review) are quoted flat from $750, and a monitoring digest at $129/mo turns your raw DMARC reports into a readable summary of authentication trends and new failures. The digest is a periodic report, not on-call support, and the agreement says so in writing.
The intake takes five minutes. The report lands within five business days. Your open rate is the number your whole business runs on; find out what's underneath it.
Who's behind this: Joshua Luter. I built the scanner these audits run on and I've checked the sending posture of 160+ sponsored newsletters. One person, no agency, my name on every report.
Start an audit ($350)