Reading your WillItInbox report
A walkthrough of the five score categories, what each check means, and how to prioritise fixes when you have limited time.
Guide
Every WillItInbox report is a 0–100 score broken down into five weighted categories. Here's how to read it from top to bottom and where to spend your time.
The score bands
- 90–100 Excellent — no action needed.
- 75–89 Good — small fixes will tighten things up.
- 60–74 Fair — at least one important check is failing.
- 40–59 Poor — likely deliverability problems.
- Under 40 — messages will frequently land in spam or be rejected.
Category weights
- Authentication (35) — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI. The single largest category because it gates everything downstream.
- DNS & infrastructure (20) — PTR, blacklists, TLS, HELO. What the connecting server looks like to the receiver.
- Content (20) — SpamAssassin, HTML/text balance, triggers. The body of the message itself.
- Headers (15) — Date, Message-ID, Reply-To, List-Unsubscribe. Mostly hygiene, but List-Unsubscribe is now required for bulk senders.
- Links (10) — shorteners, mismatched anchors, HTTPS. Smaller weight but a single bad link can flag the whole message.
How status maps to score
- Pass — full credit for the check's max value.
- Warn — partial credit (typically half). The check passed minimally but isn't ideal.
- Fail — zero credit and a recommendation surfaces.
- Info — no score impact. Used when a check can't run (e.g. localhost has no public IP).
Where to start
Always fix critical recommendations first. They're sorted by severity in the Recommendations panel. Authentication failures usually have the highest impact per minute of work — most of them are a single DNS record edit.
A pragmatic order of operations for most failing reports:
- Fix any failing authentication check (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
- Get any blacklist listings cleared. Most have a delisting form.
- Add or fix List-Unsubscribe headers if you send bulk.
- Tackle the top 3 SpamAssassin rules from the content category.
- Re-test.
If you only do one thing
Fix the top critical recommendation, then re-test. Most reports gain 15–30 points from a single targeted fix.
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