How to Monitor Email Infrastructure Health
Want your emails to actually reach inboxes? About 17.7% of permission-based emails never make it, and cold outreach campaigns often perform even worse. Ignoring email infrastructure health can hurt your sender reputation, lead to blacklisting, and reduce your opportunities to generate leads. Here's how to keep your email system in top shape:
- Monitor Key Metrics: Track bounce rates (keep them under 2%), delivery rates (aim for 95%+), and sender reputation (target 85+).
- Authenticate Emails: Use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to prevent spoofing and improve deliverability.
- Choose the Right Tools: Tools like Primeforge, Datadog, and Zabbix offer monitoring solutions for different needs and budgets.
- Set Alerts: Real-time notifications for issues like high bounce rates or IP blacklisting let you act fast.
- Run Regular Health Checks: Daily and weekly reviews of metrics and authentication protocols ensure smooth operation.
Quick Tip: Improving your sender reputation from 60 to 85 can boost qualified leads by 40% - without sending more emails. Start monitoring today to protect your email campaigns and maximize results.
Setting Up Monitoring Tools
Once you've built a solid email infrastructure, the next step is implementing effective monitoring tools. These tools are essential for protecting your sender reputation, ensuring email deliverability, and safeguarding your business. With 94% of organizations targeted by phishing attacks in 2023, monitoring isn't just about keeping emails flowing - it's about protecting your entire operation.
Best Monitoring Tools
Here are some standout tools to consider for monitoring your email infrastructure:
- Primeforge: A tailored solution for cold outreach campaigns, Primeforge simplifies DNS setup and includes built-in deliverability monitoring. Pricing ranges from $3.50 to $4.50 per mailbox per month. It handles technical details like SPF and DKIM configuration automatically, making it a great choice for those who want a hands-off approach.
- Datadog: Known for enterprise-grade monitoring, Datadog offers AI-driven threat detection and real-time visibility. The Pro plan starts at $15 per host per month, while the Enterprise plan begins at $23 per host per month. It’s ideal for businesses needing proactive maintenance and comprehensive dashboards.
- Zabbix: This open-source tool provides enterprise-ready monitoring with customizable visualizations and strong alerting capabilities. While it requires more technical expertise to set up, Zabbix is entirely free to use.
- New Relic: Offering usage-based pricing, New Relic combines infrastructure monitoring with application performance insights, making it versatile for businesses with diverse needs.
- Site24x7: With a Starter Plan priced at $9 per month (billed annually), Site24x7 is a budget-friendly option for small businesses seeking basic monitoring and uptime tracking.
- Middleware: This tool offers a free tier and pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.30 per GB for logs, metrics, and traces. It’s a flexible option for businesses with variable monitoring needs.
Tool Comparison: Features and Costs
| Tool | Monthly Cost | Key Features | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primeforge | $3.50–$4.50/mailbox | Automated DNS setup, cold email optimization | Cold outreach campaigns |
| Datadog Pro | $15/host | AI monitoring, real-time alerts, detailed dashboards | Enterprise infrastructure |
| Zabbix | Free (open-source) | Custom visualizations, strong alerting | Tech-savvy teams |
| Site24x7 | $9 | Basic monitoring, uptime tracking | Small businesses |
| Middleware | $0.30/GB | Full observability stack, usage-based pricing | Flexible monitoring needs |
Once you've chosen your tools, the next step is configuring them to ensure they work seamlessly with your email infrastructure.
How to Configure Monitoring Tools
Effective monitoring starts with setting up your tools to cover all critical aspects of your email system. Here's how to get started:
- Validate SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records: Regularly check these authentication protocols and set up alerts for any changes. Primeforge automates this process, but with tools like Zabbix, you may need to create custom scripts to query DNS records and flag issues.
- Monitor bounce rates: Keep an eye on bounce rate trends by setting up API integrations. This helps you quickly identify and address potential deliverability problems.
- Track IP reputation: Connect your monitoring tool to blacklist databases like Spamhaus, Barracuda, and SURBL. Running these checks hourly can help you catch and resolve IP reputation issues before they escalate. Datadog, for instance, can automate these checks and provide historical data for better insights.
- Enable real-time alerts: Set up notifications via email, Slack, SMS, or webhooks to ensure your team is informed immediately when something goes wrong.
- Establish performance thresholds: Define baseline metrics for delivery rates, authentication success, and server response times. Monitoring these metrics helps you quickly spot anomalies. Companies that invest in such systems report up to a 40% improvement in incident response times.
- Integrate with incident management platforms: Link your monitoring tools to platforms that automate responses. This ensures alerts trigger immediate actions, assign responsibilities, and track progress toward resolution.
Start with a simple setup and expand as new needs arise. These configurations will help keep your email system running smoothly while optimizing your cold outreach efforts.
Key Metrics to Track for Email Health
Keeping an eye on key metrics is crucial to ensuring your email campaigns stay on track and achieve strong deliverability. With sender reputation accounting for 80% of email deliverability and 25% of emails failing to reach inboxes due to reputation issues, it’s clear that tracking these indicators is a must to safeguard your efforts and resources.
Authentication Protocols: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
To prevent email spoofing and improve deliverability, you need to implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols. Each plays a unique role: SPF authorizes specific IPs to send emails on your behalf, DKIM ensures the email’s content hasn’t been tampered with, and DMARC enforces policies for handling failed authentications.
Marcel Becker, Yahoo's Senior Director of Product, highlights the importance of these protocols:
"All of these requirements have been well documented best practices for years. A lot of senders have already implemented them. Authenticating your email traffic should be something that you're already doing if you care about the health of your email traffic as well as your infrastructure."
To get started, set up SPF and DKIM correctly and create a DMARC record in monitoring mode (p=none). This lets you gather data without affecting email delivery. Review DMARC reports weekly to identify legitimate sending sources and catch unauthorized domain usage. Research shows that while 75% to 80% of domains with DMARC records struggle to enforce policies, those that do often see delivery rates improve by 5% to 10%.
Primeforge simplifies this process by automating SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configurations from the start, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring your email traffic is properly authenticated.
Bounce Rates and Delivery Rates
Bounce and delivery rates are vital indicators of your email infrastructure’s health. They can quickly point to issues like poor list quality, authentication errors, or reputation problems before these escalate.
- Delivery Rate: Measures how many emails are accepted by receiving servers.
- Bounce Rate: Tracks how many emails are rejected.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what the numbers mean:
| Metric | Excellent | Good | Concerning | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery Rate | 95-99% | 90-94% | 80-89% | Below 80% |
| Bounce Rate | Below 2% | 2-5% | 5-10% | Above 10% |
Understanding the difference between hard bounces (permanent failures like invalid email addresses) and soft bounces (temporary issues like full inboxes) is key. A good rule of thumb? If an email soft bounces three times, treat it as a hard bounce and remove it from your list.
For example, Spotify reduced their bounce rate from 12.3% to 2.1% in just 60 days by using Mailchimp's Email Verification API. This improvement boosted their deliverability and added $2.3 million in revenue.
To replicate such success, validate your email lists and send only to verified addresses. A strong email verification process not only protects your sender reputation but also enhances campaign performance.
Once you’ve optimized these metrics, the next step is to focus on maintaining a solid IP reputation.
IP Reputation and Blacklist Monitoring
Your IP reputation plays a major role in whether your emails land in inboxes or spam folders. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) evaluate your sending domain’s reputation, factoring in your DMARC status and other metrics.
Regularly monitor your IP reputation using tools like Spamhaus, Barracuda, and SURBL. Conduct hourly checks to quickly resolve any issues. Free tools like SenderScore provide reputation evaluations, while McAfee’s TrustedSource offers reputation insights for internet identities.
Key factors to watch include:
- Spam Complaint Rates: Keep this below 0.1% for optimal performance. Anything above 0.5% is considered poor.
- Engagement Metrics: Focus on sending to contacts who have opened or interacted with your emails previously.
- Sending Volume Consistency: Sudden spikes in volume can raise red flags with email providers.
Another critical metric is your domain burn rate, which reflects how long your domains remain effective. A healthy domain lasts 12+ months, while poor practices can reduce this to under 3 months. To improve engagement and protect your reputation, craft highly personalized emails with at least 2-3 tailored elements.
When working with new domains, start small - sending 2-5 emails per day in the first week and increasing by 5 each week. For established domains (6+ months old), you can safely send 30-50 emails daily. With enterprise-level setups and proper IP rotations, you can scale to 50-100 emails per day. Always keep your total volume under 100-200 emails per day per domain to avoid harming your reputation.
Building an Alert System
An effective alert system, like the one in Edge Delta's automated monitoring platform, helps identify problems before they disrupt your campaigns. The key is to design the system so it can tell the difference between normal variations and actual issues, minimizing unnecessary alerts.
"Alerting triggers an automated response when monitors detect abnormalities."
Setting Alert Thresholds
Properly defining alert thresholds is crucial to ensure notifications remain useful and actionable. For example, if your overall bounce rate nears or exceeds 2%, or if your hard bounce rate goes beyond the industry standard of 0.5%, it’s time to investigate. Similarly, keep an eye on delivery rates and authentication results (such as DMARC, SPF, or DKIM failures). Even small changes in these metrics could indicate misconfigurations or unauthorized sending attempts. By establishing baseline metrics based on your typical operations, you can fine-tune thresholds to reduce false alarms and focus on actual problems.
Setting Up Notification Channels
To make sure alerts reach the right people quickly, use multiple notification channels. Google Cloud suggests combining different types of channels for backup - if you rely on mobile app alerts and webhooks, consider adding email or SMS as secondary options.
- Email is ideal for low-priority issues.
- SMS works well for medium-priority alerts.
- Phone calls with unique ringtones should be reserved for high-priority incidents.
Integrating tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams can also make incident response smoother by creating a centralized space for team discussions and resolutions. As Rohit Sharma, Director of Engineering at FrankieOne, put it:
"SuprSend simplified our notification system with the right abstractions and a unified layer across email, in-app, and Slack. Great product, great team - highly recommend."
Webhook notifications are another powerful option, allowing automated responses to certain types of alerts. Pairing this with escalation procedures ensures that if an alert isn’t acknowledged, additional team members or management are looped in.
Finally, make it a habit to regularly test and review your notification channels. This ensures they’re fully integrated with your monitoring system and ready to perform when needed.
sbb-itb-be7a2e3
Best Practices for Long-Term Email Health
Keeping a close eye on your email infrastructure is essential for avoiding issues and ensuring smooth growth over time.
Daily and Weekly Health Checks
Daily monitoring is all about catching immediate issues. Start by checking delivery rates every morning and keep an eye on bounce rates - anything over 2% might point to DNS or sender reputation problems.
Weekly reviews give you a broader perspective. Dive into engagement metrics like open and click-through rates to identify trends across campaigns. Pay attention to your sender reputation score - falling below 80 often signals email hygiene issues that could hurt your deliverability. It’s also a good idea to review your DNS settings weekly, ensuring that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are correctly configured, especially after any updates to your infrastructure.
Authentication protocols need regular attention, too. Failed DMARC alignments or SPF checks might indicate misconfigurations or unauthorized email activity. Even minor changes in these results can hint at deeper issues that need addressing.
Quarterly, focus on cleaning your email lists. Research from ZeroBounce, based on six billion emails, revealed that only 57% of email addresses are valid and safe to use. Maintaining clean lists can significantly improve performance - open rates can jump by as much as 50%. This regular maintenance is vital for any serious cold outreach efforts.
Once you’ve established these routines, automate and scale them to keep your email operations running efficiently.
Scaling Your Monitoring with Primeforge
As your email campaigns grow, manual monitoring becomes less practical. Primeforge offers tools to simplify large-scale oversight while maintaining the precision needed for successful cold outreach.
One standout feature is bulk DNS updates. Instead of logging into multiple domain registrars to adjust SPF or DKIM records, you can manage everything from Primeforge’s platform with just a few clicks. This centralized approach reduces errors and saves time, complementing your daily and weekly monitoring efforts.
Primeforge also supports multiple workspaces, making it easier to organize monitoring by client, campaign type, or region. You can seamlessly move domains and mailboxes between workspaces as your needs evolve, while keeping dedicated dashboards for each project. This is especially helpful when managing dozens - or even hundreds - of domains.
Automation is another strength. Primeforge automates configurations for DNS, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, following industry standards to reduce the risk of human error. Coupled with regular monitoring, this automation ensures a reliable and scalable setup for your email operations.
Cost efficiency is another bonus. Primeforge can save you 46% compared to Google mailboxes and 25% compared to Microsoft. These savings add up quickly when managing hundreds of mailboxes.
For even better results, consider integrating Primeforge with other tools in the Forge Ecosystem. For example, Mailforge can provide shared infrastructure, while Infraforge supports private setups. This diversification can protect your campaigns from widespread disruptions and keep your operations running smoothly.
Primeforge is compatible with any sending software, so you can integrate it into your existing workflow without disrupting your current processes. This flexibility makes it easier to implement thorough monitoring across your entire email infrastructure, regardless of the tools you’re already using for campaign management.
Conclusion
Keeping a close eye on your email infrastructure is essential for effective cold outreach. The steps we've discussed - like setting up monitoring tools, tracking authentication protocols, creating alert systems, and conducting regular health checks - work together to safeguard your sender reputation and improve deliverability. By focusing on these areas, you can build a reliable foundation for scalable outreach efforts.
Automation plays a big role when scaling operations. Tools like Primeforge simplify technical tasks, such as automated DNS setup and bulk management, while also cutting costs. This allows you to dedicate more time to optimizing your campaign performance.
"I've been using a couple of other email infra forges for over a year and have been pretty impressed with deliverability. Now I added Google mailboxes and been using them for months as one of the early adopters to spread the load of 10K+ emails/day over to more ESPs. Stellar deliverability on Salesforge and spam tests always come back green!" - Rahul Lakhaney, Former VP, Gartner, now CEO @ Enrich.so and Maximise
A successful cold outreach strategy depends on diversifying ESPs and maintaining consistent monitoring. This reduces the risk of overloading your infrastructure while meeting the technical expectations of inbox providers. Whether you're sending 100 emails per day or 10,000+, the same principles apply: monitor frequently, keep authentication protocols clean, and use tools that scale with your growth.
Ultimately, robust monitoring and smart automation ensure that technical improvements lead to real-world results. A healthier email infrastructure means better deliverability, which translates into more prospects, meaningful conversations, and increased revenue. Investing in monitoring and infrastructure not only enhances campaign performance but also safeguards your sender reputation for the long term.
FAQs
What steps can I take to improve my email sender reputation for better deliverability?
Improving your email sender reputation is key to making sure your messages actually reach your audience. Here’s how you can do it:
First, authenticate your emails with protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These tools help confirm that your emails are coming from a trusted source, which lowers the risk of them being marked as spam.
Second, keep your email list clean. Remove inactive contacts and make sure everyone on your list has opted in. A well-maintained list not only improves engagement rates but also signals to email providers that your content is relevant and welcomed.
Finally, if you’re working with a new IP or domain, warm it up slowly. Start by sending small batches of emails to your most engaged subscribers. This gradual approach helps establish trust with email service providers, paving the way for better deliverability over time.
By putting these practices into action, you can strengthen your sender reputation and see better results from your email campaigns.
What’s the difference between SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and how do they improve email security?
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are key email authentication protocols designed to safeguard your domain against spoofing and phishing attempts, ensuring your email communications remain secure and trustworthy.
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This protocol checks whether emails sent from your domain are coming from servers you’ve authorized. It does this by comparing the sender's IP address to a list you’ve set up in your DNS records.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature to your emails. This signature confirms that the message hasn’t been altered during transit and verifies the sender’s identity.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): DMARC brings SPF and DKIM together. It outlines how to handle emails that fail authentication and provides detailed reports to help you track and improve your domain’s email security.
These protocols don’t just strengthen your defenses against attacks - they also boost email deliverability, which is especially critical for businesses running cold outreach campaigns. Primeforge makes managing this easier by offering email infrastructure solutions with features like automated DNS setup and advanced security configurations tailored to help your outreach efforts succeed.
What are the best practices for creating an alert system to monitor email infrastructure effectively?
To set up an effective alert system for monitoring your email infrastructure, start by outlining specific goals. Prioritize areas like reducing downtime, maintaining high email deliverability, and keeping server performance at its best. These priorities will guide you in pinpointing critical metrics to monitor, such as email bounce rates, server load, and disk capacity.
Leverage automated alerting tools to keep your team informed of any unusual activity or breaches of predefined thresholds in real time. Tailor these alerts to suit your operational needs so you can address potential issues promptly, before they grow into larger problems. For a more streamlined approach, tools like Primeforge offer specialized features for email infrastructure management. These include real-time monitoring, dedicated IP options, and simplified DNS management - all designed to help you stay compliant and boost email performance.