How to Check Your Email Is Set Up Correctly (in 10 Minutes)

Most email problems are caused by settings nobody has looked at since the day they were set up, and you can check most of them yourself in about ten minutes, for free.

This guide shows you how to see what other mail servers think of your email, which free tools to use, and what the results mean. You don’t need any technical knowledge, and you won’t change anything, so there’s no risk of breaking your email.

This is the single most useful check, and it takes two minutes:

• Send an email from your business address to a Gmail account (a personal one is fine).
• Open it in Gmail on a computer, click the three dots next to the reply button, and choose “Show original”.
• Look near the top for three lines: SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Each should say PASS. If any say FAIL, NEUTRAL, SOFTFAIL or NONE, or DKIM is missing, that’s a problem worth fixing, because Gmail is using these results to decide whether to trust you. Our guide to what SPF, DKIM and DMARC mean explains what each one checks.

A free service called mail-tester.com gives you a temporary address to send a test email to, then scores it out of 10 and lists anything that counts against you.

Send it a normal business email, the kind you’d send a customer, rather than a one-word test. A score of 9 or 10 is good. Anything lower comes with a list of reasons, which is a useful to-do list in itself.

Your domain’s settings are public, so free tools can read them for you. Two good ones are the MxToolbox SuperTool and Google’s Check MX tool in the Google Admin Toolbox. Enter your domain name (the part after the @) and look at:

• MX records — these should point to your email provider, such as Google or Microsoft. If they point somewhere you don’t recognise, email may not be arriving where you expect.
• SPF — there should be exactly one SPF record. Two or more is a common mistake that breaks SPF entirely. It should include every service that sends email for you.
• DKIM — this should be set up for your email provider. With Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 it often has to be switched on separately, so it’s commonly missing.
• DMARC — there should be a DMARC record. If there isn’t one, other mail servers have no instructions for handling email that fails the checks, and anyone can more easily pretend to be you.

A few results come up again and again:

• “Multiple SPF records” — two SPF records usually means someone added a new service without merging it into the existing record. Fixing this often solves spam problems straight away.
• “Too many DNS lookups” — SPF is limited to 10 lookups. Add enough services and it quietly stops working.
• DMARC set to “p=none” — this means you’re monitoring only. That’s a sensible starting point, but it doesn’t yet stop anyone pretending to be you.
• No DMARC record at all — worth fixing, especially as Google and Yahoo now expect it from anyone sending email in volume.

Your own mailbox passing the checks doesn’t mean everything else does. Repeat check 1 with emails from each system that sends on your behalf:

• your website contact form (fill it in with your Gmail address)
• an invoice from your accounting software
• a booking confirmation or shop order
• a newsletter sent to yourself

It’s very common for the main mailbox to pass while the website or invoicing system fails. If it’s your website that fails, our guide on why contact forms stop sending emails explains why.

Blocklists are lists of servers and domains known for sending spam. Being on one can send your email straight to junk. MxToolbox has a free Blacklist Check: enter your domain and it checks dozens of lists at once.

Don’t panic about a single listing on a small, obscure list. Listings on the major lists are the ones that matter. Our guide to why emails go to spam covers blocklists in more detail.

It’s worth running through these checks:

• after setting up a new email service or website
• after moving email provider or web host
• after adding a new tool that sends email for you
• if customers say they haven’t received your emails
• every few months anyway, because problems can creep in unnoticed

Remember that “sent” doesn’t mean “delivered”. Our guide on why “it sent” doesn’t mean “it arrived” explains why problems can go unnoticed for months.

If everything passes, great: note the date and check again in a few months. If something failed, resist the temptation to start editing DNS records by trial and error. Changing the wrong record can stop your email working entirely.

If you’re just getting started, our guide on setting up professional business email covers the basics. And if you’d like someone to look at your results and fix what’s wrong, that’s exactly what our free initial assessment is for.

If a check fails and you want to see what the receiving server recorded, see how to read email headers.

Need help fixing this?

We provide:

• Free initial assessment
• Clear explanation of the issue
• Fixed-price solutions
• UK-based support

If your checks turn up a FAIL, a warning or something you don’t understand, we can find the cause and fix it properly.