Testing MailerLite emails

So what should you test instead? MailerLite's own advice is to duplicate the draft and send it to yourself as a regular campaign. That's also the cleanest way to use Email Spam Tester.

A regular campaign, one recipient group

You need a test address first. The home page gives you one, free and without an account, and it lasts an hour and accepts one message.

1. Go to Subscribers > Groups and click Create group. Call it "spam test" or similar.
2. Put the test address in it, and, if you ticked the inbox test, its provider inboxes.
3. Duplicate your draft campaign.
4. Under Select recipients, choose only the new group.
5. Send.

The report comes back with a score out of 10 and out of 100, and every check grouped under authentication, infrastructure, spam engines, content, bulk sender rules and recommendations. A short fix plan sits underneath. Each fix comes with the DNS record to copy where one is needed, plus how many points it's worth. Those points are what the related checks cost right now, so nobody guessed them. The docs explain every check, if a name in the report is unfamiliar.

Leave the marker from the inbox test untouched in the subject. The campaign then shows whether it went to the inbox, spam or a tab like Promotions, for Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and other providers, which answers "is it going to spam?" far better than a look at your own inbox. Delete the test address from the group afterwards.

Sending from a Gmail or Yahoo address

If you started out with a free address as the sender, MailerLite doesn't send from it as is but adds a MailerLite subdomain, so john@yahoo.com goes out as something like john.yahoo.com@send.mailerlite.eu. Accounts with more than 50,000 subscribers don't get this rewrite.

You'll see that address in the report's Headers tab, and the authentication results then describe MailerLite's domain rather than anything you own. According to MailerLite, a free-domain sender carries a high risk of ending up in the spam or junk folder, and the fix there is a sender address on your own domain rather than anything in the email. MailerLite's campaign guide suggests your own name at your company's domain, yourname@yourcompany.com in its example, and advises against no-reply addresses.

The list itself matters as much as the sender. MailerLite's anti-spam policy names the levels that put an account at risk, which are spam complaints above 0.2%, bounces above 5%, unsubscribes above 1% or an open rate below 3%.

Your own domain: three records, then alignment

On a custom domain, authentication isn't optional in MailerLite, and new accounts can send without it only during the 14-day trial. The path is Account settings > Domains > Add domain, then authenticate, as the authentication guide shows. Partner DNS providers can be set up automatically, otherwise you add three records by hand:

• DKIM, a CNAME at litesrv._domainkey pointing to litesrv._domainkey.mlsend.com;
• SPF, a TXT record on the root, along the lines of v=spf1 a mx include:_spf.mlsend.com ~all (copy the exact value from your account);
• a domain verification TXT record.

MailerLite wants an exact match and won't let you edit the values on its side. Two problems are worth heading off. If you already have an SPF record, don't add a second one. Merge the include into the existing record, because two SPF records break authentication completely. And some DNS hosts append the domain to whatever you type, so the DKIM target needs a trailing dot (litesrv._domainkey.mlsend.com.). The DKIM checker (selector litesrv) and the SPF checker show whether it all resolves. If your SPF record has grown with includes from several services, the checker also counts DNS lookups against the limit of ten, and this page shows how to trim a record that's over it.

Then there's domain alignment, a separate and optional step that MailerLite still recommends strongly. It adds a subdomain with an A, an MX and a TXT record, which MailerLite uses for headers and tracked links. Turn alignment off after sending and the links in those older campaigns stop working.

DMARC is up to you

MailerLite doesn't create a DMARC record for you. It suggests one, v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.com, and recommends it once you send around 5,000 emails or more. The report checks DMARC regardless of your volume, so a missing record costs points even on a list of 300. The DMARC checker shows what's published, and this explainer covers how the three records fit together.

Unsubscribe headers on a real campaign

On a real campaign MailerLite includes List-Unsubscribe and the one-click mechanism by default, and adds an unsubscribe link to the footer. Both unsubscribe checks in the report should pass. If they fail, make sure you sent a regular campaign and not a test. Gmail, MailerLite notes, sometimes doesn't show its unsubscribe button even when the header is there, while the report reads the header itself.