Reading your results

Every completed Audit opens a structured report organized into seven views: five scored diagnostic sections, a normalized Score Breakdown, and an unscored Sending Activity chart.

Overall score and weight normalization

Aimly calculates an overall health score from 0 to 100 using five weighted categories:

Diagnostic section	Base weight	Scope
Inbox Placement	30%	Full audit
Email Authentication	25%	All audit modes
Hard Bounce Rate	20%	Full audit
Domain Blocklist	15%	All audit modes
Recipient Engagement	10%	Full audit

If a section was not run (for example, Inbox Placement during a DNS-only or manual-probe audit) or is marked not_applicable, Aimly excludes that section and rescales the remaining active weights to 100% so partial audits are never penalized for unconfigured checks. Hard Bounce Rate is also excluded when the mailbox sent nothing in the last 30 days, and Recipient Engagement when it contacted no eligible external recipients in that period; the remaining weights are rescaled to 100%.

Overall health bands:

• 80 – 100 (Good) — authentication, reputation, and placement signals are healthy.
• 50 – 79 (Needs attention) — one or more medium- or high-impact deliverability risks require remediation.
• 0 – 49 (Poor) — critical authentication gaps, blocklist listings, high bounce rates, or severe spam placement detected.

Each flagged issue reports its Impact (High, Medium, or Low), a clear Issue summary, and a deterministic, rule-based Suggestion (no external AI API key is required to generate audit fixes).

1. Domain Blocklist (15% base weight)

Checks your sending domain and, when a live message is available, your sending IP address across three reputation tiers:

• PhishDestroy (20% of section) — checks domain presence against active phishing and abuse feeds.
• UCEPROTECT Levels 1–3 (45% of section) — checks IPv4 sending reputation across individual IP (L1), /24 allocation (L2), and ASN (L3) tiers. When mail egresses over IPv6, UCEPROTECT is marked not_applicable and excluded cleanly from scoring.
• HaGeZi Threat Intelligence Feeds (35% of section) — evaluates threat, fake-domain, and newly-registered-domain (nrd_7, tif_medium, tif_ips, fake) signals.

2. Email Authentication (25% base weight)

Evaluates published DNS records alongside live message header verification (when a live probe or full audit is run).

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

Verifies that a single valid v=spf1 TXT record exists and checks its terminal qualifier:

Terminal qualifier	Meaning	Audit impact
-all	Hard-fail unauthorized sending servers	Pass (no issue)
~all	Soft-fail unauthorized senders (mark suspicious, still accept)	Medium
?all	Neutral policy (no spoofing protection)	Medium
+all	Permits any server on the internet to send as your domain	Medium
Missing terminal all	Defaults to neutral for unmatched senders	Medium
No SPF record	No authorized sender policy published	High

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)

Verifies selector resolution, cryptographic signature validity, and public-key strength:

• Ed25519 or RSA 2048-bit and above — Pass (strong key).
• RSA 1024-bit — Medium impact (upgrade to 2048-bit RSA or Ed25519 recommended).
• Other RSA keys under 2048 bits, or a malformed public key — Medium impact with no key-strength credit.
• Missing DKIM record — High impact.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance)

Evaluates multiple tags on _dmarc.<domain> independently:

• Organizational policy (p=) — p=reject passes in full; p=quarantine flags Medium impact; p=none (monitoring only) or a missing DMARC record flags High impact.
• Subdomain (sp=) and non-existent subdomain (np=) policies — verifies whether subdomains inherit or explicitly enforce protection.
• Enforcement percentage (pct=) — earns full marks only when at least one policy (p, sp, or np) enforces quarantine or reject and pct=100. If the record remains at p=none, pct does not receive enforcement credit.
• Identifier alignment (adkim= / aspf=) — checks relaxed (r) vs. strict (s) domain alignment between the visible From: domain and SPF/DKIM domains.

MX and BIMI

• MX records — verifies that mail exchanger records exist and resolve to routable hosts. Missing, null, or unresolvable MX records flag a High-impact finding.
• BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) — checks _bimi DNS records when DMARC actively enforces quarantine or reject. If DMARC is none or missing, BIMI is marked not_applicable rather than failing so remediation stays focused on DMARC first.

3. Inbox Placement (30% base weight)

During a Full audit, Aimly dispatches 10 unique test emails spaced approximately 25 seconds apart across seed probe mailboxes and verifies where each message is delivered:

• Inbox — found in the mailbox's Inbox folder. Aimly does not distinguish Primary from Promotions or other inbox tabs.
• Spam or junk — found in the mailbox's spam or junk folder.
• Not received — sent, but not found in either folder before the check timed out. Test emails your own mail server refused to send are excluded from the counts.

Because this test observes live filtering decisions by real receiving providers, Inbox Placement carries the largest weight (30%) in a Full audit.

4. Hard Bounce Rate (20% base weight)

Scans the mailbox's trailing 30 days of outbound sent mail and Delivery Status Notification (DSN) bounce messages:

• Calculates permanent (5.x.x) hard bounces as a percentage of sent volume.
• The section score falls in direct proportion to the bounce rate. A rate below 2.0% gets a Pass status; at 2.0% or above it is flagged as high impact with list-hygiene recommendations.

5. Recipient Engagement (10% base weight)

Analyzes the trailing 30 days of inbound conversation activity using message headers only:

• Measures how many unique external addresses you contacted also emailed you back, excluding automatic replies such as out-of-office messages.
• Message bodies are never stored during engagement analysis.

6. Score Breakdown & 7. Sending Activity

• Score Breakdown — displays exact points earned, active weight share, and status for every diagnostic section in one summary table.
• Sending Activity — plots daily outbound email volume over the past 30 days so you can spot sudden volume spikes or warmup gaps. Sending Activity is informational and does not directly add or subtract points.

Exporting PDF reports

Click Download PDF in the top-right corner of any completed audit report to export a formatted PDF summary containing your overall score, section breakdowns, DNS findings, and remediation instructions for your engineering or IT team.