Sender Reputation Intake Audit (Onboarding)

Sender Reputation Intake Audit (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Pull the client's sending history before any campaign work is scoped

   Request 90 days of bounce logs, complaint rates, and per-domain volume from whatever sending layer they use today, whether that is Mailgun, Postmark, or a legacy in-house SMTP relay. A client arriving with a 4% bounce rate needs remediation priced into the retainer, not discovered in week three.

2. 02

   Map every domain and subdomain the client sends from, including ones they forgot about

   Marketing, transactional, and sales outreach frequently run on separate subdomains with separate reputations. List each one with its owning team so accountability is not split across three vendors.

3. 03

   Verify SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records against the actual sending infrastructure

   Authentication gaps are the most common root cause of bulk spam placement. EasyDMARC-style scanning surfaces alignment failures quickly, but confirm the records match the IPs and ESPs genuinely in use rather than the ones on the last architecture diagram.

4. 04

   Separate shared-IP and dedicated-IP exposure across the client portfolio

   If two clients share a sending pool, one client's purchased list can degrade inbox placement for the other. Document which accounts sit on shared infrastructure and flag any client whose list acquisition practices are unknown.

5. 05

   Score list acquisition quality and segment by consent age

   Ask how each list was built and when. Contacts older than 12 months with no engagement signal should be quarantined rather than mailed, because re-engagement blasts to dormant addresses are the fastest route to a blocklist.

6. 06

   Baseline current inbox placement with a seed test before changing anything

   Run a placement test across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo to establish a pre-engagement number. Without a baseline, no later improvement claim is defensible in a client review.

7. 07

   Write the findings into a one-page risk register the client signs off on

   List each domain, its authentication status, its list quality grade, and the remediation owner. This document becomes the reference point when deliverability problems surface mid-campaign and the question of fault arises.