Cold Email Campaign Readiness Checker

How the 100-point score is built

The checker mirrors how deliverability teams audit a campaign before the first send. Points follow risk, not effort:

• Authentication (25): SPF, DKIM and DMARC at 7 points each, TLS at 4. These decide whether receivers trust your domain at all.
• List quality (25): suppression and verification at 7 each, because bad recipients create bounces and complaints no template can fix.
• Inbox readiness (20): ramp, capacity, monitoring and recovery, the operational side of not overwhelming young mailboxes.
• Campaign design (20): segments, variables, stop rules and test sends, where most visible launch failures happen.
• Compliance (10): identity, postal address and opt-out. Low points, but every one of them is a critical blocker.

If you want the operational detail behind these numbers, start with the campaign launch guide and the list cleaning guide.

Why a critical blocker overrides the score

A score is additive; risk is not. A campaign with perfect copy, a clean list and a documented ramp plan still fails if DMARC is missing or opt-outs are ignored, because those failures are absolute:

• Missing authentication gets filtered by Gmail and Yahoo regardless of everything else you did right.
• Emailing a suppressed contact is a legal exposure per message, not a quality deduction.
• One broken variable or missing stop rule damages every recipient it touches.

So the checker resolves blockers first. Any critical check answered No, or Not sure, forces Do Not Launch even at 95 points. Not sure counts as unmet on purpose: if nobody on the team can confirm a critical control, it is not in place. The fix plan then orders work the same way: compliance and suppression first, authentication second, then verification, campaign mechanics, and capacity. The volume planner and bulk email verifier cover the two most common gaps.

Self-reported answers have limits

This tool scores what you declare, not what your DNS actually says. That distinction matters most for authentication, where teams often believe a record exists that was never published, or was published on the wrong domain. Two rules keep the result honest:

• Treat every authentication Yes as provisional until the live deliverability test confirms it against real DNS records.
• Treat Ready as clearance for a small monitored pilot, not proof of inbox placement. Placement depends on reputation and engagement signals no checklist can see.

Before the pilot, it is also worth pressure-testing your targeting with the segmentation guide, since relevance drives the reply and complaint rates that decide how the pilot ends.