Email Deliverability Audit Template for Quarterly Reviews

Direct answer: A quarterly email deliverability audit is a recurring governance artifact and checklist used to assess sending health, provider signals, authentication posture, suppression and incident history, and to assign owners and evidence for remediation and monitoring. This template organizes those checks into concise, repeatable steps so teams can compare trends and make decisions each quarter.

Practical steps (what to prepare before the audit)

• Gather provider exports and dashboards for the quarter (postmaster/console reports, delivery logs, complaint/bounce lists). Link to provider guidance where relevant [1][2][3].
• Export authentication reports (DMARC aggregate reports, DKIM verification logs, SPF results) and current DNS records.
• Produce suppression and unsubscribe list exports, recent appeal logs, and any change/incident tickets since the last audit.
• Pre-fill the decision checklist (asset) with owners and attached evidence to keep the meeting short.

Quarterly checks and why they matter

• Provider trends: Look for delivery drops, increased transient failures, or console notes from major providers. Providers publish guidance for senders and support channels—capture those references when relevant [1][2][3]. Do not assume provider algorithms or thresholds beyond what the vendor documents.
• Authentication: Confirm that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are published and aligned for each sending domain. If you lack DMARC aggregate data, note that the audit cannot measure domain alignment and mark as evidence missing.
• Complaint & bounce signals: Separate hard bounces from soft/fail bounces and check complaint trajectories versus previous quarters. If you don’t have complaint aggregation, record that as missing evidence rather than guessing a rate.
• Suppression lists: Verify that your suppression list aligns with opt-outs and appeals. Check for accidental re-imports or orphan records.
• Incidents & changes: Record any outages, major template/content changes, new third-party senders, or DNS/key rotations since the last review. These often explain sudden metric shifts.

Decision workflow (use the attached checklist)

• For each item, assign an owner and capture evidence. Use the decision column to place items into one of: Monitor, Remediate (with deadline), or Escalate (to provider or legal/PM). The asset table in this template is structured for exactly that purpose.

Edge cases and provider-aware cautions

• Low-volume senders: Some provider signals are noisy at low volumes; document volume context and avoid overreacting to single-events.
• Multiple sending domains or partners: Audit each domain separately and require partner evidence for shared-IP or third-party sends.
• Missing evidence: If a metric cannot be measured from available exports, mark it as “evidence not available” and assign an owner to collect it next cycle. Do not infer provider thresholds or claim specific cause without provider confirmation.

Where this fits in your toolkit

• Use this quarterly artifact alongside day-to-day observability tools; start by linking operational dashboards or observability pages such as your email-sending observability console for follow-up checks: [/repmail/learn/email-platform/email-sending-observability]. Also review sender reputation context when changes appear: [/repmail/learn/deliverability/sender-reputation]. For broader background, consult the complete guide to email deliverability for playbooks and deeper remediation steps: [/repmail/learn/deliverability/complete-guide-to-email-deliverability].

Sources

[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/14668346?hl=en [2] https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126 [3] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/sender-support-in-outlook-com

Related resources

Continue with the related RepMail guide, the related RepMail guide, the related RepMail guide.

Related resources

Continue with the complete guide to email deliverability, review the provider-specific triage guide, and use the sender reputation guide when the workflow crosses into a neighboring concern.