Deliverability monitoring tools
for cold email.
Deliverability monitoring answers one question: is the mail reaching the inbox rather than spam or a block. GrowthPal publishes free checkers for the parts you can test yourself — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX and blacklists — and the commercial tools below exist for the parts you cannot, chiefly placement testing and continuous monitoring.
This page covers what these tools measure, which parts of the job GrowthPal's own free tools already do, and the five monitoring tools in the directory.
What you can check yourself, free
Authentication and reputation are directly testable and GrowthPal publishes a checker for each: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX records and blacklists. They run in the browser, need no signup, and answer a yes-or-no question about a domain's configuration. If any of those fail, no commercial monitoring tool will help until they are fixed.
What they cannot tell you
What a correctly configured domain cannot tell you is where the mail actually lands. Inbox placement varies by mailbox provider, by sending history and by the content of the message, and the only way to observe it is to send to seed addresses across providers and look. That is what placement testing does, and it is the main reason to pay for a tool in this category rather than run the free checks.
The deliverability monitoring in the directory
Each take below is GrowthPal's own, written from the operator's side of the desk. They are opinions about fit, not reviews, and they carry no rating. The directory is built from tools GrowthPal uses. No listing here is sponsored, affiliated or paid for, and there is no commercial relationship behind any entry.
| Tool | GrowthPal's take |
|---|---|
| EmailGuard Review | Inbox placement tests and blacklist monitoring in one dashboard. Cheap insurance for expensive campaigns. |
| GlockApps Review | Seed-list testing: see exactly which tab, or which spam folder, you land in at every major provider. Reality checks on demand. |
| Google Postmaster Tools Review | Free, first-party, and most senders never open it. Your Gmail domain reputation, straight from Google's mouth. |
| MailReach Review | Warmup plus a spam score you can actually act on. Good at answering "why did this stop landing?" before it costs you a month. |
| MXToolbox Review | Free DNS, SPF, DKIM and blacklist checks. The first tab to open when something smells off, and it's been that tab for 20 years. |
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a paid deliverability tool?
Not to start. Authentication and blacklist status are testable for free, and most deliverability problems are configuration problems. A paid tool earns its place when you are sending at volume and need continuous placement monitoring across providers rather than a point-in-time check.
What does a placement test actually measure?
A placement test sends a message to a set of seed mailboxes across different providers and reports which folder each copy landed in. It is a sample, not a census: placement for one message to seed addresses is evidence about your sending reputation, not a guarantee about any individual recipient.
Why does GrowthPal publish free versions of these checks?
Because they are cheap to run and the answers are unambiguous. A domain either has a valid SPF record inside the ten-lookup limit or it does not; it is either on a blacklist or it is not. Charging for a yes-or-no answer that a script can produce in a second would be hard to justify. The checks that genuinely cost money to run — continuous placement monitoring across providers — are the ones the commercial tools here sell.
Related
- check a domain's SPF record
- the cold email deliverability checklist
- check a domain against blacklists
- the full tool directory
Sources
- Tool takes: the GrowthPal tool directory.
- GrowthPal's own figures: how the numbers on this site are counted.
Last reviewed . Vendor pricing and features are not published here and are not reviewed on this cadence.