The 5-Minute Email Infrastructure Health Check

You might not know it, but your email system could be down right now until customers start to complain.

Most businesses don't know about email problems until they start to lose money. For example, when transactional emails bounce, password resets go to spam, or notifications never arrive.

You don't need to spend a lot of money on monitoring tools or hire a full-time DevOps team to find most email infrastructure problems before they become urgent.

A quick health check once a week can help you avoid problems with delivery.

Why Your Email Infrastructure Needs Regular Checkups

Think of your email infrastructure like a car. You wouldn't wait for the engine to die on the highway before checking if you need an oil change. Yet that's exactly how most companies treat their email systems—they assume everything's fine until something breaks spectacularly.

Email infrastructure degrades quietly. Your sending reputation can drop gradually. Authentication records can break after DNS changes. IP addresses can land on blacklists without warning. By the time you notice the symptoms (lower open rates, customer complaints, bounced emails), you're already losing revenue.

A quick weekly health check catches these issues early, when they're still easy to fix.

The 5-Minute Health Check Routine

Set a recurring calendar reminder for the same time each week. Here's exactly what to check:

1. Send a Test Email (1 minute)

Send yourself a test transactional email through your system. Not a marketing email—an actual transactional message like a password reset or order confirmation.

Check three things:

• Delivery speed: Did it arrive within 30 seconds? Delays suggest server issues or queue backups.
• Inbox placement: Did it land in your primary inbox or spam folder?
• Content rendering: Do all images, links, and formatting display correctly?

If this test email fails any of these checks, something's wrong with your infrastructure right now.

2. Review Your Bounce Rate (1 minute)

Log into your email platform and check yesterday's bounce rate. You're looking for two numbers:

• Hard bounces: Should stay below 2%. Higher means you're sending to invalid addresses, which damages your sender reputation.
• Soft bounces: Occasional soft bounces are normal, but a sudden spike indicates server problems or temporary blacklisting.

A healthy email infrastructure maintains consistent, low bounce rates. Sudden changes are red flags.

3. Spot-Check Delivery Metrics (1 minute)

Look at your delivery rate from the past 7 days compared to the previous week. You're not analyzing trends here—you're just checking if anything looks obviously wrong.

• Delivery rate dropped by 5% or more? Something changed recently that's hurting deliverability.
• Spam complaints increased? Your content might have issues, or your list needs cleaning.
• Unsubscribes spiking? Could indicate you're sending to the wrong audience or too frequently.

These aren't normal fluctuations. They're warnings that something needs attention.

4. Verify Your Authentication Records (1 minute)

Use a free tool like MXToolbox or Google's Admin Toolbox to quickly verify your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are still valid.

This sounds technical, but it's literally just pasting your domain into a checker tool. DNS changes, server migrations, or expired DKIM keys can break authentication overnight. When authentication breaks, your emails start landing in spam immediately.

Most companies only check authentication during initial setup, then never again. That's a mistake. Check it weekly.

5. Monitor Your Sending Volume (1 minute)

Compare this week's sending volume to your typical baseline.

• Volume dropped unexpectedly? Your application might not be triggering emails correctly. Customers could be missing critical notifications.
• Volume spiked dramatically? Could indicate an email loop, compromised account, or misconfigured automation sending duplicate messages.

Unusual volume changes almost always mean something's broken—either you're not sending emails you should be, or you're sending emails you shouldn't be.

What to Do When You Find Problems

The point of this health check isn't to stress you out—it's to catch issues while they're still small and fixable.

When you spot something wrong:

For immediate issues (test emails not arriving, authentication failures): Stop what you're doing and investigate now. These problems are actively costing you money.

For trending problems (slowly increasing bounce rates, gradual delivery drops): Schedule time this week to dig deeper. You have some runway, but don't ignore it.

For minor anomalies (one-day spike in soft bounces, slightly slower delivery): Note it and watch for patterns. Not everything requires immediate action.

Making It Automatic

Once you've run this health check a few times, it becomes second nature. You'll spot problems instantly because you know what "normal" looks like for your infrastructure.

Some teams automate parts of this with monitoring tools. That's fine, but don't skip the manual check entirely. Automated monitoring catches technical failures, but it often misses the nuanced issues that hurt deliverability—like emails that technically deliver but consistently land in spam.

The best email infrastructure combines automated monitoring with regular human oversight.

The Real Cost of Skipping Health Checks

Here's what happens when you don't monitor your email infrastructure regularly:

A SaaS company running on autopilot doesn't notice their authentication records broke after a DNS provider migration. For three weeks, all their transactional emails land in spam. They only discover the problem when support tickets spike about "missing password reset emails." By then, they've lost trial conversions, frustrated existing customers, and damaged their sender reputation enough that fixing the authentication doesn't immediately solve the inbox placement problem.

Five minutes per week would have caught this on day one.

Another company ignores gradually increasing bounce rates because "a few percent doesn't seem like a big deal."

Over six months, their sender reputation degrades to the point where major ISPs start bulk-foldering their emails. Recovering from poor sender reputation takes months of careful list hygiene and volume management. What started as a small, fixable problem becomes a business-threatening crisis.

Your Infrastructure Deserves Attention

Your email system takes care of some of the most important communications with your customers, such as resetting passwords, confirming orders, sending security alerts, and onboarding new customers. Your customers will notice right away when it doesn't work.

The good news? You don't have to be on guard all the time or buy expensive tools to keep it healthy. If you do it every week for just five minutes, it will catch most problems before they get worse.

Put that reminder in your calendar right now. Choose a day and time every week. Go through these five checks.

When you catch that authentication failure before it hurts your deliverability or that bounce rate spike before it hurts your sender reputation, your future self will be grateful.

It's not hard to keep your email infrastructure healthy. It just needs to be paid attention to all the time.