OutboundQA
Catches cold email infrastructure problems before a campaign goes out, not after it burns a domain.
- 15
- infrastructure checks
- 3
- possible verdicts
The problem
Cold email fails for boring reasons. A missing DMARC record, a tracking domain without SSL, an inbox on a domain registered three weeks ago. Nobody finds out until sends are already landing in spam, and by then the domain reputation is spent. The checks all exist as separate lookup tools, which is why nobody runs all of them.
What I owned
- Check engine
- Verdict model
- Report generation
- Marketing site
How it works
- 01
Fifteen checks, one verdict
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX, domain age, blacklist presence and tracking-domain SSL, run across every sending domain, inbox and tracking domain in an uploaded CSV.
- 02
Ready, Needs Fix, or Do Not Launch
Fifteen green ticks is not an answer; it is homework. The output is one of three verdicts with the exact fix for each failure, because the person uploading the CSV wants to know whether to press send today.
- 03
Evidence, not assertions
Every result shows the public record it was derived from. A tool that says your DMARC is wrong without showing the record it read is asking for trust it has not earned.
- 04
Shareable client report
Agencies run this for clients, so the report is the deliverable: a link they can forward rather than a screenshot they have to explain.
What happened next
Sunsetted after launch. The checks were sound and the verdict model held up; the problem was that a domain audit is something a team does once a quarter, not a thing they come back to weekly. Worth knowing before building the next one.
Stack
- DNS lookups
- SPF/DKIM/DMARC parsing
- Blacklist APIs
- TypeScript
- React