deliverability-doctor: are we landing in spam?

Diagnostics Cowork-ready

What it does

Audits whether your email actually reaches the inbox, then hands you the verdict that every downstream send spec has to respect.

It covers:

The DNS and auth stack: SPF, DKIM, DMARC alignment, and one-click unsubscribe, checked live rather than assumed.
Complaint and bounce triage against the Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft bulk-sender rules, which became hard requirements rather than guidelines.
Engaged-send ratio, warmup schedules, and sunset/suppression policy.
The ESP bill: what you are paying to store profiles that will never open anything again.

Then it renders the send-readiness verdict: SEND-CLEAR / SEND-RESTRICTED / SEND-BLOCKED.

Read-only. It never touches your DNS, your ESP settings, your flows or your lists.

When to reach for it

Monthly, as the standing hygiene check.
Open rates or clicks crashed and nothing about the content changed.
Before a volume increase, so you find out whether the list can absorb it before you find out the hard way.
Before building flows. retention-architect reads this verdict before it specs any send volume.
Your ESP bill looks larger than your list deserves.

Where it runs

Cowork ✓ Desktop ✓

Both. The DNS checks run locally.

What it needs from you

The sending domain and any subdomains you send from.
ESP access or a recent export for complaint, bounce and engagement rates.
Your current send cadence and volume.

What you get back

The send verdict, with its constraints written out. SEND-RESTRICTED comes with the specific volume ceiling, not a vague caution.
The auth stack audited line by line, with the exact DNS records to add or fix.
Complaint and bounce rates against the platform thresholds, so you know how close to the edge you are.
A warmup schedule if you need one, and a sunset policy if you do not have one.
The bill-savings math on suppressing dead profiles.

A worked example

You: “Are we landing in spam?”

Verdict: SEND-RESTRICTED. DMARC is published at p=none with SPF alignment failing on the ESP’s sending domain, so Gmail is treating a portion of the volume as unauthenticated. Complaint rate is 0.28%, under Gmail’s 0.30% hard threshold but inside the band where a bad send tips it over. Constraint: hold weekly volume at current levels until alignment is fixed and complaints sit under 0.10% for two weeks. Bill note: 41% of profiles have not opened in 12 months.

Tips & gotchas

SEND-RESTRICTED is not advisory. Its constraints get carried verbatim into any flow spec built afterward. Do not re-litigate the ceiling downstream.
Complaint rate is the metric that ends senders. Gmail’s threshold is a cliff, not a slope.
Sunsetting feels like deleting revenue and is not. Dead profiles suppress your deliverability to the people who would have bought.
Fix auth before you touch content. No subject line survives failing SPF alignment.

Rides as the monthly row inside weekly-account-os. Its verdict is a required input to retention-architect.