Deliverability work, done by people. Not by another dashboard.
For when the GlockApps subscription has stopped translating into action items, when the DMARC RUA reports are arriving but nobody has the time to actually read them, when something is filtering and the in-house team can't tell whether it's the SPF chain, the DKIM rotation, the list hygiene, or all three. We do the receiver-side work — authentication review, BIMI rollout, blocklist remediation, Postmaster Tools and SNDS monitoring, FBL registration, monthly DMARC processing turned into items you can actually act on. Sold standalone — works on top of SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, in-house Postfix, anything you're already running — or paired with our sending products. 23 years of operator experience layered on top of whatever dashboards your team already has.
Tools tell you what's happening. People tell you what to do about it.
The deliverability tooling market in 2026 is full of genuinely capable products. GlockApps does inbox placement testing across 70+ seed addresses for $59-$99 per month. Validity Everest sells the broadest reputation suite available, with Elements Plus at $525/month and Enterprise tiers running $15K+ per year. Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, and Yahoo Sender Hub are free and excellent. MXToolbox, dmarcian, Valimail, MailReach, InboxAlly, Folderly, Warmy.io, SendForensics — every layer of the stack has tools available, most of them good ones. The problem isn't tool availability. It's that none of those tools interpret the data for you, none of them build the remediation plan, and none of them execute the work. That's still a person's job, and the person needs to actually have done it before.
This service is the human side of that equation. Our team has been running production email infrastructure since 2003 — across the period when SPF stabilised, when DKIM was introduced, when DMARC enforcement became a Gmail and Yahoo requirement in 2024, when BIMI moved from optional to brand-defining, when Spamhaus published its formal position on cold email in June 2025. The work comes in three engagement shapes that match how deliverability problems actually arrive: a one-time audit when you need a diagnostic and a written remediation plan; an ongoing retainer when you need continuous monitoring and tactical intervention every month; a strategic engagement when deliverability is a structural concern across multiple brands or programs that needs senior attention.
What's covered across all three engagement levels
SPF, DKIM, DMARC alignment
Authentication records reviewed, alignment validated, DMARC policy progressed where appropriate (none → quarantine → reject), aggregate reports processed monthly. This is the table-stakes work that became non-negotiable after the 2024 Gmail/Yahoo enforcement.
Blocklist remediation
Spamhaus SBL/XBL/CSS/DBL, Barracuda, SORBS, SURBL, URIBL, and 50-plus other DNSBLs monitored regularly. Delisting follows the published process for each list, but the root cause has to be fixed first — submitting a delisting request without addressing the cause is how you get listed again next week.
Google Postmaster Tools
Setup if you haven't run it before, then continuous monitoring of domain reputation, IP reputation, complaint rate, spam rate, encryption stats. The trends matter much more than any single-day reading — single days tell you nothing useful.
Microsoft SNDS
Smart Network Data Services tracking per IP for the Outlook and Hotmail side. Filter-result trends, complaint signals, reputation classifications all rolled into the monthly report. Microsoft is stricter than the others; we watch it accordingly.
BIMI rollout
Brand Indicators for Message Identification: the BIMI DNS record published, the SVG logo hosted properly, DMARC enforcement validated, VMC certificate guidance with DigiCert or Entrust as the issuer. Visible payoff is in Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail — your logo where the avatar used to be.
FBL registration and processing
Feedback loop registration with AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Microsoft, Comcast, and the other major receivers. Complaint processing endpoints wired up to feed your suppression list automatically — so the complaint signals actually do something instead of arriving in an inbox nobody opens.
List hygiene assessment
MX validity sampling, role-account flagging, suspected spamtrap pattern detection, disposable-domain identification, engagement-history analysis. Fundamental to most reputation problems.
Monthly performance reporting
Trend lines (not single-day snapshots), comparative IP performance, per-receiver placement evolution, complaint rate against the 0.1% Gmail/Yahoo threshold, action items prioritized by impact and effort.
Three engagement shapes plus a Custom quote
The pricing reflects how deliverability work actually arrives. Sometimes you need a focused diagnostic with a written remediation plan — that's the audit. Sometimes you need ongoing monitoring with regular tactical intervention — that's the retainer. Sometimes you need a structural strategic engagement with a dedicated consultant — that's the Strategic tier. The three are designed to fit together: the audit fee credits against the first three months of any subsequent retainer, so audit-then-retainer customers don't end up paying twice for the diagnostic phase.
Engagement
Price
Structure
Includes
Best fit when
Deliverability Audit
€1,500
One-time
Full diagnostic + written remediation plan, 5–10 business days
Annual prepayment qualifies for a 10% discount on the retainer engagements. The Audit is delivered as a written document a technical team can act on, not as a slide deck — typically 15 to 25 pages with prioritized findings, root cause analysis, remediation steps with effort estimates, and an executive summary suitable for sharing with non-technical stakeholders. Audit turnaround is 5 to 10 business days from kickoff depending on the complexity of the existing environment.
Why not just use GlockApps or Validity Everest and skip the consulting layer?
Many of our clients use both. GlockApps and Validity Everest are excellent at what they do — surfacing data through dashboards. They tell you that your sending domain reputation is "low" in Postmaster Tools, that your complaint rate spiked 40% last week, that 30% of your Outlook traffic is hitting spam, that your DMARC alignment failed for 12,000 messages from an unauthorized source. What they don't do is tell you why, what to do about it in what order, and how to execute the fix. That's a human operator's job. The dashboards plus the operator together produce results; the dashboards alone produce data that often sits unactioned because nobody has time to interpret it. Authorize Hosting Managed Deliverability is the operator. We're explicitly complementary to the dashboards your team already runs — many engagements involve us reviewing the customer's GlockApps reports and Postmaster Tools data weekly, building intervention plans from what's there, and executing the work. The combined cost (GlockApps $99/mo + Authorize Hosting Ongoing €1,200/mo = $1,299/mo total) is well below what an in-house deliverability hire costs and produces actionable progress rather than just dashboards.
How this stacks up against dashboards and consultancies
Deliverability stack components compared, April 2026
Layer
Examples
Typical cost
What it provides
What it does NOT provide
Free monitoring tools
Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, Yahoo Sender Hub
The shape that emerges is consistent. Dashboards surface data. Tools build engagement. Consultancies write reports. The persistent gap is the day-to-day operator work — interpreting what the dashboards are showing, executing the remediation, maintaining the relationships with Spamhaus and Microsoft and Google, applying twenty-something years of pattern recognition to figure out whether this week's Outlook placement drop is a real problem or just normal noise. That's the gap this service sits in. It's not a tool replacement; it's the operator who makes the tools your team is already paying for actually produce results.
How an engagement actually unfolds
Managed Deliverability workflow — audit, remediation, ongoing monitoringThe audit produces a diagnostic and a prioritised remediation plan. Remediation executes that plan over the following weeks. Quick wins — authentication fixes, FBL registration, DMARC policy progression — usually land within days. Slow wins — reputation recovery, list cleanup propagation, blocklist delisting after the cause is fixed — take 4 to 12 weeks for moderate cases. Ongoing intervention keeps the gains and catches new problems before they escalate. The dashboards your team already runs — GlockApps, Validity Everest, the free tools — stay in place. We work alongside them, not in place of them.
The shapes that fit this
Post-incident recoveryAfter a Spamhaus listing, Microsoft block or Postmaster reputation drop. The audit identifies the cause, remediation executes the fix, ongoing prevents the recurrence.
Pre-launch validationBefore launching a new sending program, new product, new brand, or major campaign. The audit catches authentication gaps and reputation gaps before they become incidents.
Annual deliverability reviewAudit-only engagement once per year for teams with stable sending. Catches drift in authentication, surfaces emerging blocklist patterns, validates that DMARC posture is current.
Multi-brand or multi-domain portfoliosThe Strategic engagement is built for this case. Coordinated DMARC strategy, BIMI rollout across the portfolio, comparative reputation tracking, executive reporting that maps to the brand structure.
Post-acquisition integrationWhen two sending programs merge, deliverability complications surface immediately. The Strategic engagement handles the integration including reputation reconciliation and coordinated DMARC migration.
Compliance-driven deliverabilityHealthcare, finance, government workloads where missed transactional email creates compliance exposure. Ongoing engagement keeps reputation tight and provides the audit trail.
Adding deliverability expertise to in-house infrastructure teamStrong engineering teams that run their own MTAs but don't have a dedicated deliverability operator. The retainer becomes the deliverability function without an in-house hire.
Agency client servicesMarketing agencies offering deliverability work to their clients. White-label engagements available on Custom plans where Authorize Hosting is the back-office operator and the agency owns the client relationship.
What this service promises and what it doesn't
What it promises. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI configured according to current best practice, validated continuously, and aligned with whichever sending infrastructure you're running. Blocklists monitored across 50-plus DNSBLs with weekly checks on the retainer plans, and proper remediation engagement when listings happen. Postmaster Tools, SNDS, and Yahoo Sender Hub data interpreted weekly with action items rolled into the monthly report. DMARC aggregate reports processed into actionable findings rather than raw XML nobody opens. Complaint rates tracked against the 0.1% Gmail/Yahoo threshold with intervention guidance when something is trending the wrong way. Communication direct and timely — no ticketing-system black hole, no quarterly business review substituting for weekly work.
What it does not promise. Specific inbox placement rates, because those depend on variables outside any one party's control: recipient engagement, list quality, content quality, receiver-side policy changes that nobody outside Google's filter team sees coming. Guaranteed Spamhaus delisting timelines, because Spamhaus operates on its own published process and listing severity varies wildly. Reputation recovery faster than the underlying receiver systems allow — 4 to 12 weeks for moderate damage, 6 to 12 months for severe. Anyone promising those outcomes is selling something other than realistic deliverability work, and the long-term cost of buying that promise outweighs the short-term comfort of hearing it.
One specific point worth being direct about: the receiver-side AI dimension. Gmail's RETVec deployment improved spam detection by 38% and reduced false positives by 19.4%. Gmail now blocks more than 99.9% of spam at the receiver layer, before it ever reaches a human inbox. Microsoft has integrated similar machine learning into Defender. The implication for legitimate senders is that authentication and reputation signals matter more than they ever have — there is no superficial copy trick or sender-side hack that defeats a transformer-based filter trained on billions of messages. The work that actually produces sustainable results in 2026 is the unglamorous foundational kind: clean authentication, healthy lists, real engagement, complaint rates below 0.1%, properly aligned DMARC. Our role is doing that work consistently, and interpreting the signals when receivers tighten their filtering further (which they continue to do, roughly quarterly). Anyone promising shortcuts around the AI filter layer is working against systems specifically built to detect exactly those shortcuts.
Works on top of any sending stack
Sold standalone — you can be sending through SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Amazon SES, in-house Postfix, Exim, KumoMTA, your own PowerMTA license, or any combination, and the engagement applies the same way. The operator work happens at the deliverability layer, which sits above whichever sending infrastructure is in play. Customers running on our own sending products (SMTP Relay, Email API, PowerMTA Servers, Dedicated Email Servers, Cold Email Infrastructure) get tighter integration on monitoring and faster remediation cycles, but it isn't a prerequisite. Plenty of engagements never touch our infrastructure at all — the customer keeps their existing platform and uses our deliverability operator capacity to make that platform produce better results.
Common questions about Managed Deliverability
FAQ
The questions that come up most often before someone signs
What does a deliverability audit actually cover?
The €1,500 audit goes through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC record configuration and alignment; BIMI status and VMC requirements; sending domain and IP reputation across Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, and Validity Sender Score; blocklist status across 50-plus DNSBLs (Spamhaus SBL/XBL/CSS/DBL, Barracuda, SURBL, SORBS, URIBL); list hygiene assessment with random-sample testing; FBL registration status; complaint-rate trends if data is accessible. The deliverable is a written report with a prioritised remediation plan organised by impact and effort — a document a technical team can actually act on, not a slide deck with charts. Typical turnaround is 5 to 10 business days from kickoff.
What's the difference between Ongoing (€1,200/mo) and Strategic (€3,500/mo)?
Ongoing is continuous monitoring and tactical intervention — weekly blocklist checks, daily Postmaster Tools and SNDS tracking, monthly DMARC aggregate report processing, complaint-rate alerts, FBL maintenance, monthly performance report with action items. Strategic adds the architectural and consulting layer on top: quarterly architecture reviews of the entire sending stack, multi-domain deliverability strategy across the brand portfolio, BIMI implementation including VMC certificate guidance, executive-level reporting suitable for sharing with non-technical stakeholders, a dedicated deliverability consultant assigned to the account, and structured remediation engagements rolled into the retainer rather than billed separately each time.
Do I need to be a sending customer to use this service?
No. Managed Deliverability is sold standalone. Plenty of engagements are with senders running on third-party infrastructure — SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Amazon SES, in-house Postfix, anything else — where the customer wants experienced operator eyes on the deliverability work without changing their sending platform. The service is structured to work alongside whatever's already in place.
How does this compare to GlockApps, Validity Everest, or other deliverability tools?
GlockApps ($59-$99/month) is an inbox placement testing platform — it tells you where seed-list emails landed and what your DMARC reports say. Validity Everest (Elements Plus $525/month, Enterprise $15K+/year) is a much larger SaaS suite covering similar testing plus reputation monitoring and competitive intelligence. Both are tools that surface data. Both still need someone to interpret the data and decide what to do about it. This service is the human side of that equation — experienced operators who interpret what the dashboards are showing, build remediation plans, and execute the work. Plenty of our customers use GlockApps or Everest for the dashboards and us for the expertise applied to those dashboards.
Can you help with a Spamhaus listing right now?
Yes — though the right entry point depends on what's going on. If the listing is acute and you need help today, write to us with the IP and the listing details and we'll scope a one-time remediation engagement. If the listing is part of a broader deliverability problem, the audit is usually the better entry: it covers the listing plus the underlying reasons, with a remediation plan covering both. Either way, Spamhaus delisting work follows their published process and requires fixing the underlying cause first — submitting a delisting request without addressing the cause is a quick way to end up listed again the following week.
What about BIMI implementation?
BIMI needs four things: a published BIMI DNS record, a properly formatted SVG logo at a published HTTPS URL, full DMARC enforcement (p=quarantine or p=reject) on the sending domain, and increasingly a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) issued by an authorised CA — DigiCert or Entrust are the two practical options. Implementation is included in the Strategic engagement and available as a separate one-time engagement (typically €1,200 to €2,500 depending on what's already in place). The visible payoff is your brand's logo appearing alongside email in Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail and Fastmail — small thing visually, real signal of legitimacy.
What's a realistic timeline for fixing deliverability?
Authentication fixes (SPF, DKIM, DMARC alignment) are quick — usually deployed within days. Blocklist remediation varies a lot by list. Barracuda and SORBS often resolve within 24 to 48 hours after the cause is fixed. Spamhaus SBL can take 7 to 14 days for major cases. Reputation recovery from a damaged sending domain is the slow part, and the part nobody wants to hear about: 4 to 12 weeks for moderate damage, 6 to 12 months for severe damage. There is no shortcut around the calendar on that one — it's how the underlying receiver systems work, and any operator promising faster recovery is either lying or about to learn something painful.
Do you guarantee specific inbox placement rates?
No. Anyone guaranteeing inbox placement rates either doesn't actually understand how inbox placement works, or is willing to mislead. Inbox placement depends on dozens of variables — sender reputation, list quality, content quality, engagement signals, recipient behaviour, receiver-side policy changes — most of which sit outside any single party's control. What this service does guarantee is that the technical work gets done properly: authentication configured correctly, blocklists monitored and remediated, complaint rates tracked against the 0.1% Gmail/Yahoo threshold. Outcomes follow from doing that work well, not from promising the outcomes.
Can you handle DMARC aggregate report processing?
Yes. DMARC aggregate (RUA) and forensic (RUF) reports get processed monthly on Ongoing and Strategic plans. The output is a list of action items — unauthorised sending sources we found, alignment failures, third-party SaaS tools that need to be properly authorised, pass/fail trends per receiver. Not raw XML dumps that nobody opens. A surprising number of teams discover legacy SaaS tools sending on their behalf without proper SPF or DKIM alignment through this process. That's exactly the kind of finding the monthly RUA report exists to surface.
Is this service available globally?
Yes. Engagements run remote, and the work product (audits, monthly reports, remediation plans) is delivered as documents and structured calls. Time-zone coordination is straightforward for European, North American, and most Asia-Pacific customers. We're operated from Stockholm, which puts the team in the EU/EMEA business hours window primarily, with extended coverage available on Strategic plans for customers needing US-coast coordination.
What if I'm not sure whether I need an audit, ongoing, or strategic engagement?
Most engagements start with the €1,500 Audit. The audit produces a written assessment that makes the next step obvious — sometimes it surfaces a single problem an in-house team can fix in a week (no further engagement needed). Sometimes it surfaces ongoing reputation work that warrants the €1,200/mo retainer. Occasionally it surfaces a multi-domain or multi-brand strategic problem that warrants the €3,500/mo level. The audit fee credits against the first three months of any subsequent retainer engagement, so audit-then-retainer customers don't get double-charged for the same diagnostic phase.
Customer engagements
Three deployments where the human layer mattered
Real engagements, names withheld, the operator team working alongside the customer's own infrastructure. The numbers and the technical specifics are intact. None of these problems would have been solved by adding another dashboard.
01
German e-commerce — recovering from a Gmail penalty during peak season
Mid-market online retailer based in Hamburg, ~€80M annual revenue
Context
In late November, Gmail Inbox placement collapsed from 96% to 38% on transactional and promotional combined. Internal team could not identify the cause. Black Friday was 12 days away. Engaged the operator team for an emergency audit and remediation.
Implementation
Audit identified the cause within 36 hours: a marketing automation campaign had hit a 0.4% complaint rate one week prior, triggering Gmail's reputation scoring downgrade. Remediation plan: pause non-essential promo for 72 hours, throttle transactional re-warming over 7 days, send list re-permission for the segment that complained.
Outcome
Inbox placement recovered to 91% by Black Friday. Full recovery to 96% within 4 weeks. The retailer's revenue impact on Black Friday was estimated at <2% reduction — versus the projected 30%+ loss if the issue had remained unresolved.
02
UK media — newsletter network with 1.2M subscribers across 8 properties
Independent media group based in London, lifestyle and culture verticals
Context
Engagement metrics had been declining gradually for 6 months across all 8 newsletters. Editorial team blamed audience fatigue. The CTO suspected a deliverability issue masking as engagement decline. Wanted an independent diagnostic.
Implementation
60-day audit covering authentication, list hygiene, segmentation logic, and ISP-specific delivery patterns. Found three issues: DKIM rotation had been broken since a CDN change in February, list cleanup had not run for 14 months, and one publication's segment definitions had drifted to include 60% inactive addresses.
Outcome
After remediation, open rates across the network rose 41% in 90 days. The audit invalidated the audience fatigue hypothesis — engagement returned to its prior baseline once the technical issues were resolved.
Major Dutch business publication based in Amsterdam, ~280k daily subscribers
Context
Yahoo and AOL placement dropped to <30% over a 3-week period. Internal team identified that this coincided with the rollout of stricter authentication enforcement in early 2024. Required external expertise to interpret the new bounce codes and remediation paths.
Implementation
Implementation of full DMARC enforcement (was at p=none), SPF cleanup to remove inherited records from a defunct sister publication, BIMI deployment with verified VMC certificate. Coordination with Yahoo's postmaster team via established operator relationships.
Outcome
Yahoo placement recovered to 89% within 6 weeks. AOL recovered in parallel. BIMI logo deployment provided a side benefit of measurable lift in open rates (3.2 percentage points) due to brand recognition in the Inbox.
04
French SaaS — engagement decline across product communications
B2B project management SaaS in Toulouse, ~8k paying customer accounts
Context
Product engagement metrics (open rate, click rate, action rate on transactional emails) were declining month over month for 9 months. Marketing assumed it was a product issue. Engineering assumed it was a deliverability issue. No one had data to settle it.
Implementation
90-day diagnostic with seed-list testing across major receiving providers, controlled A/B comparison against a fresh sender domain, and ISP-specific trend analysis. Found that the existing domain's reputation had been degraded by a previous spam-filter false positive that had never been formally challenged with the receiving providers.
Outcome
Migration to a new sender domain (warmed properly) plus formal challenge of the legacy reputation issue. Engagement metrics recovered in 4 months. The exercise also produced a runbook that the customer's own team uses to monitor and respond to similar issues going forward.
05
Italian retailer — international expansion deliverability planning
Italian fashion retailer expanding from EU to UK and US markets, headquartered in Florence
Context
Successful Italian sending operation (90%+ Inbox placement at Italian providers) was about to face UK and US markets where the same domain reputation might not transfer. Wanted a forward-looking plan rather than a reactive remediation, which is unusual but smart.
Implementation
8-week strategic engagement designing the international sending architecture: separate sending subdomains per market (.uk, .us TLDs), staged warming plan synchronised with the marketing launch calendar, ISP-specific authentication tuning. No remediation needed because there was no problem yet — this was preventive design.
Outcome
UK launch hit 88% Inbox placement from week 1 of customer-facing sending (above the team's 75% pre-launch forecast). US launch followed in month 4 with similar trajectory. Marketing and engineering teams cited the upfront planning as a major contributor to the smooth international launch.
All engagements anonymised at the customer's request. Industry descriptors, volumes, and technical details reflect actual deployments. Specific company identifiers have been withheld.
Where to look next
Three places that usually answer the next question
Some teams need help around relay or API-based sending. Others need deliverability support wrapped around outbound infrastructure or more advanced server environments. Each of these covers one of those.
The right look when the deliverability concerns are tied to outbound structure, domain separation, or how the environment itself is set up — that's where this engagement pairs naturally with infrastructure.
The right look when deliverability work and infrastructure control need to be considered together rather than treated as separate decisions on separate tracks.
