Deliverability Monitoring alerts

Deliverability Monitoring will alert you to any sender authentication or reputation issues. Once you’ve set up Deliverability Monitoring, you will receive a deliverability rating for each domain and start getting alerts for any deliverability issues. 

Types of checks and alerts 

Any new issue detected with Sender Authentication or Reputation Monitoring will prompt an alert that will be highlighted on your Deliverability page. If you have email notifications turned on in your Settings then you will receive an email with any alerts. The alerts are per domain.

Sender Authentication

For Sender Authentication, we check DKIM, DMARC, SPF, DNS and List-Unsubscribe. We also check if the email met Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender requirements for sender identity verification and one-click unsubscribe using List-Unsubscribe. These checks are run as soon as you upload or send your email to your dedicated monitoring email address. You will be immediately alerted to any issue once we receive your email and complete the check. We will also continuously monitor SPF, DKIM and DMARC policies for basic validity and send an alert if an issue is flagged.

Reputation Monitoring 

Reputation Monitoring continuously checks your monitored domains and IP addresses against over 60 blocklists and will alert you if you’re detected on one.

Not all blocklists have the same impact on your deliverability. If you are on a blocklist, we will classify the impact for you according to five different levels of priority.

Deliverability Monitoring overview page

Your Deliverability Monitoring page can be found on the Deliverability tab in the Monitor section of your account. This is where you'll see an overview of all of your monitored domains and Litmus Deliverability Rating for each, as well as alerts.

Alerts section

Alerts are available at the top of your Deliverability Monitoring page. You'll see alerts for both top level and subdomains surfaced here. Click on each alert to go to the specific domain overview page where you can learn more about the issue and how to troubleshoot.

Domains section

Just below the Alerts section you’ll see your monitored top level Domains. Every domain will have a Litmus Deliverability Rating. If any domains have issues, then the Litmus Deliverability Rating will be Fair or Poor. Expand each domain to see any subdomains, as well as the reputation rating and number of Sender Authentication issues for each. Select the specific domain name or arrow to get to the domain overview page.

Individual domain overview page

The domain overview page is where you get the details for the checks run on each specific domain, including issues and help for fixing.

Once you are on a specific domain's overview page, you'll see a table showing which checks have passed (green check) or failed (red x). If a check is not applicable, you'll simply see a dash.

Any checks with issues are shown in your Review section. Each check provides the results, next steps, a button to Learn more, a button to View all emails, and a button to Share check details. Some checks also have the option to Dismiss alert. If the check is specific to an email we received, you'll also see the email(s) where the check failed. Click on the email to view the full results for that individual email.

If there is a blocklist issue, the check results will list each blocklist where an issue was found, including its impact and a button to Troubleshoot. The Troubleshoot button pulls up more details about the blocklist, as well as information for the Removal Process with that blocklist. Note that the results also has a link to the full list of 64 known blocklists that we check against.

Your Passed section lists all the checks that passed, which means no issue was detected. If no issue was detected, the emails that were checked will not be listed below the check. You can still find them in the email history.

Sometimes you'll see a Not Applicable section. Each check that was not run will be listed here with an explanation that there's no cause for concern, plus more information of how to make sure this check is run if you were expecting it.

Email history

The most recent emails checked will be in the Emails section at the very bottom of the domain overview page.

Select the View all emails link (or the View all emails button under any check with issues) to see the full history of all of the emails we've received under that domain. You can click into any email to see the details of the Results, Header and Email at the time we received that email.

Dismiss and resolve alerts

Sender Authentication issues

Sender Authentication failures that are entirely at the domain level (for example, a badly-formatted SPF record published on the domain) cannot be dismissed. The alert will clear once the issue is fixed and we receive an email or run a check and the issue is no longer there.

If a specific email has a Sender Authentication issue (not at the domain level), you'll see the email listed under the failed check results. In this case, you'll also see the teal button to Dismiss alert. Once you dismiss the alert, the page will refresh to show that check is green and passing with no emails listed.

An example of when you would want to dismiss an alert is if you have a failed check for a list-unsubscribe header, but it's for a transactional email where a list-unsubscribe header is not required.

If you navigate to your email history to view that specific email's detail page, you'll still be able to see that the email failed that check, but it will no longer be flagged on your domain overview page.

If you later send a new email with the same issue for that domain, the check will go red again. Only the new email will be listed in the check results as having the issue since you told us to ignore the previous email.

Reputation Monitoring issues

Blocklist issues will automatically clear once you are no longer on the blocklist.

You also have the option to Exclude from monitoring if you have determined the blocklist is not impacting your deliverability and/or you do not want to be alerted to that blocklist listing for that domain anymore. Excluding it means that you want to ignore failures for that specific blocklist against that specific domain or IP.

Once you tell us to ignore the alert, the alert will clear. If you change your mind at any time, you can go to your Configure page where you manage your domains and remove it from the blocklists being excluded from monitoring.

To find the Exclude from monitoring button, first select the Troubleshoot button next to the specific blocklist alert. The Exclude from monitoring option is at the bottom of the info panel.

Litmus Deliverability Rating

Each domain being monitored will have an overall deliverability rating of Poor, Fair, or Good. The rating is derived from the reputation rating plus any Sender Authentication issues for the domain and all of the domain’s subdomains. If one subdomain has an issue, that will impact your overall deliverability rating for the domain, even if your parent or top domain has no issues. 

If you have any Sender Authentication issues, your deliverability rating will be listed as Poor because those issues are critical to your deliverability.

Your reputation rating will be listed as Poor, Fair or Good based on if you are listed on any blocklists and the impact severity of those blocklists.