Transactional mail gets filed with the coupons
Order confirmations and campaigns share one domain reputation. Once the domain reads as promotional, receipts land in Promotions or spam, and the customer opens a support ticket instead of the email.
For ecommerce brands
Your order emailsare not all arriving.
Receipts, shipping updates and campaigns leave from different systems on different subdomains. When one of them drifts, you find out from support tickets, not from your ESP dashboard.
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LitInboxes is an email deliverability monitoring platform for businesses and agencies that depend on email for revenue, customer communication, or client results.
The problem
Where it breaks for a store
None of these show up as an error in the tool you send with. That is why they last for months.
Your ESP subdomain is not aligned
Klaviyo, Shopify, your subscription app and your helpdesk each send from a different subdomain. SPF and DKIM can pass while DMARC alignment still fails, which is invisible in the ESP report and very visible to Gmail.
A listing lands mid-promotion
A blocklist entry on the sending domain or the IP behind it does not wait for a quiet week. With no sweep running between campaigns, the first signal is revenue per send falling.
Complaint rate creeps before peak season
Waking a stale segment in October is how a store arrives at Black Friday with a spam rate it cannot walk back in two weeks.
Nobody owns the DNS
The records were set up once, by a developer or an agency that has moved on. A CDN migration or a new app rewrites a TXT record and no one notices until placement drops.
The fix
What LitInboxes does about it
Monitoring only, on a loop. You keep sending with whatever you send with today.
- 01
Every subdomain, not just the root
Add the store domain, the ESP send subdomain and the helpdesk subdomain as separate monitored domains. Each gets its own SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS and BIMI check every 6 hours, and its own health grade.
- 02
DMARC reports name the failing sender
Aggregate reports are ingested and grouped by sending source, so you can see that receipts are aligned and the campaign subdomain is not, without opening raw XML.
- 03
Blocklist sweeps between campaigns
8 high-signal blocklists on every plan, 24 on Pro, across the domain and the IPs behind its A and MX records. A new listing comes with the operator's delisting steps.
- 04
Content scored before the send
Paste a campaign and get an Rspamd score with every triggered rule explained: link and image ratio, trigger words, subject line problems, missing unsubscribe.
- 05
List hygiene before a reactivation
Run the segment through syntax, MX and SMTP verification and drop what is invalid or risky before it turns into bounces and complaints.
In the product
One screen per domain
Every monitored domain gets a grade, the signals behind it, and the issues that need a fix, next to the DNS and blocklist state that produced the grade.
Ready to sendA · 92+3 this week
Provider: Amazon SES|ESP verification: verified|Webhook: active
DNS & authentication
SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS, rechecked every 6 hours.
SPF · passDKIM · passDMARC · passMTA-STS · pass
Last checked · 12 min agoMonitor activeIssues: 0
DMARC
99.2%99.2%pass rate, 30 days
912 reports · 48,120 messages
Deliveries
Healthy0.3%bounce rate, 7 days
0.02% complaint rate
Blocklists
Clean0 / 24listed
Spamhaus, Barracuda, SpamCop and 21 more
Recent activity
Infrastructure check completed, no issues12 min ago
DMARC pass rate back above 99%6 hours ago
Delisted from Spamhaus DBL1 day ago
New DKIM selector detected and verified2 days ago
The domain overview, as it looks in the app.
The numbers
What you actually watch
Four numbers decide whether a store's email arrives. All four are published, and all four are checked for you.
DMARC pass rate
The share of your mail that authenticates and aligns, broken down by sending source, from the aggregate reports providers already send.
Bad looks likeBelow 95% means a real sending system of yours is unauthenticated.
Blocklist state
The domain and its mail-server IPs checked against 8 lists, 24 on Pro, with the return code the operator published.
Bad looks likeA Spamhaus ZEN or DBL hit, which large providers consult directly.
Google Postmaster spam rate
Gmail's own reported spam rate for your domain, pulled from Postmaster Tools and kept over time.
Bad looks likeAbove 0.3%, where Google's bulk sender guidelines stop being met.
DNS drift
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS and BIMI re-resolved every 6 hours and compared against the previous check.
Bad looks likeA DKIM selector that silently stopped resolving after an app change.
The mechanism
Why alignment decides everything for a store
SPF passes on the envelope domain your ESP uses. DKIM passes on whichever domain signed the message. DMARC ignores both of those on their own and asks one question instead: does either of them match the domain the customer sees in the From line? Most ESPs sign with their own domain by default, which means SPF and DKIM can both report pass while DMARC alignment quietly fails.
For a store the consequence is specific. Receipts sent from your own domain align. Campaigns sent from the ESP subdomain do not. Gmail then treats one brand as two senders, and only one of them accumulates reputation. Your best-performing mail is carrying trust that your worst-performing mail never inherits, and no report inside the ESP will tell you that is happening.
The fix is to complete branded sending inside each tool so the signing domain is a subdomain of yours, then keep watching it. A reinstalled app, a migrated CDN or a new subscription tool can reset the record and nothing errors when it does. DMARC aggregate reports are the only place the split shows up, which is why they are worth ingesting rather than deleting.
Getting started
Your first twenty minutes
In order. Step two is the one most stores skip.
- 01
Add the domain your store sends from
One scan reports what SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS and BIMI look like right now, and grades the result.
- 02
Add every sending subdomain
Check your ESP, helpdesk and subscription apps for the exact From domain each one uses. Those are the domains that matter, not the storefront.
- 03
Point DMARC reporting at LitInboxes
Update the rua address in your DMARC record. Aggregate reports start landing daily from the large providers.
- 04
Turn on alerts before your next campaign
Email on every plan; Slack, Discord and webhooks on Pro. You want the listing notification before the send, not after.
Growing, $49/mo
Find out what your order emails are doing.
Honest limits
When LitInboxes is the wrong tool
Three things a store might want that LitInboxes does not do.
- You want us to send your campaigns. LitInboxes never sends marketing email.
- You want guaranteed inbox or Promotions-tab placement. Nobody can sell that honestly, because providers do not publish tab decisions.
- You want one dashboard for ad spend, revenue and email. LitInboxes watches deliverability only.
Questions
Questions from this crowd
Do you send my campaigns?
No. LitInboxes never sends your marketing email. You keep Klaviyo, Shopify, Mailchimp or whatever you use, and LitInboxes monitors the deliverability of what they send.
Will LitInboxes tell me if I am in the Promotions tab?
Not directly. Gmail does not report tab placement to anyone. What you get is the set of signals that decide it: authentication and alignment, domain reputation, the spam rate Gmail reports in Postmaster Tools, blocklist state, and content scoring.
How do I monitor a Klaviyo or Shopify sending subdomain?
Add it as its own monitored domain, using the exact From domain in the ESP's sending settings. That is usually a subdomain like mail.yourstore.com, not the storefront domain.
We run several store domains. Does each need its own plan?
No. A plan covers a number of monitored domains: 1 on Starter, 5 on Growing, 50 on Pro. Several brands can live in one workspace.
Can it fix DNS for me?
No, and no honest tool should hold your DNS. LitInboxes names the record that is wrong, gives you the corrected value, and confirms the fix on the next check.
What happens if something breaks during Black Friday?
Alerts fire on the change: a new blocklist listing, a DMARC pass rate drop, a record that stopped resolving. Email on every plan; Slack, Discord and webhooks on Pro, with what changed and what to do.
Growing, $49/mo
Find out what your order emails are doing.
Other use cases
High-volume senders
Past a few thousand messages a day, providers stop judging emails and start judging you. The numbers that decide it are published.
Read the use caseSaaS and transactional email
A filtered password reset is a churn event that looks like a product bug. Transactional email fails the way infrastructure fails: quietly.
Read the use case
Related reading
- Why Is My Email Going to Spam? A Calm DiagnosticSpam placement is almost always an identity or reputation problem, not a wording problem. Work the causes in the order receivers actually weigh them.
- The Weekly Deliverability Review: What to Check on Every Client DomainFour signals drift without announcing it. Here is what each one means when it moves, the order to triage them in, and where a weekly pass stops being enough.
Find out what your order emails are doing.
Check the domain your store sends from against 8 blocklists and its DNS records. No account needed.
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