Email Deliverability DNS Audit

A graded deliverability verdict for any domain, in one call. Raw DNS lookups are a commodity; knowing what the records mean is the work. This Actor fetches SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and MX over DNS-over-HTTPS, parses them the way a mailbox provider does, and returns a grade (A to F) with an ordered fix list.

What it evaluates

• MX: can the domain receive mail at all.
• SPF: present, single (multiple records are an RFC violation receivers punish), which all qualifier it ends in (-all hard fail, ~all soft fail, ?all no protection, +all spoofable), and estimated DNS lookup count against the limit of 10.
• DMARC: present, policy strength (none merely monitors; quarantine/reject protect), subdomain policy, percentage, and whether rua= reporting exists (without it you are flying blind).
• DKIM: probes 14 common selectors (google, selector1/2, k1, mandrill, resend, and more) — pass your ESP's custom selector as input for exact coverage.

Output

One summary row:

{
  "domain": "example.com",
  "grade": "C",
  "score": 70,
  "mx_count": 2,
  "spf": { "all_qualifier": "~all", "enforcement": "soft fail", "dns_lookups_estimate": 4 },
  "dmarc": { "policy": "none", "reporting": false },
  "dkim_selectors_found": [],
  "fixes": [
    "DMARC p=none only monitors; move to quarantine or reject once reports look clean.",
    "No DKIM key found on common selectors; publish DKIM or pass your selector to this audit."
  ]
}

Use cases

• Agencies and MSPs: grade a client's domain before the meeting; the fix list is the proposal.
• Cold-email and lifecycle operators: verify sending domains before campaigns, and re-verify after DNS changes.
• Agents onboarding customers: an automatic deliverability check as a signup step.

Resolution runs over Cloudflare and Google public DoH (no scraping, no mail sent, nothing touched). Unresolvable or invalid domains report cleanly and you are not charged; billing is per completed audit.

Built by 1450 Enterprises. Its first two production targets were our own sending domains, and the fix list it produced is now in our own backlog.