The quarterly review catches drift. The annual auth renewal catches staleness. The weekly check is different: it catches the surprises. An ESP decided to rate-limit you overnight. A vendor started sending from your domain without telling you. Gmail changed their filter weights. Someone in sales imported a thousand purchased leads. You don't need a full audit to catch these — just ten disciplined minutes every Monday.
Monday morning, coffee in hand, before Slack. Five items. Ten minutes. Same five things, same order, every week. The magic is the repetition — anomalies jump out because you know what normal looks like.
Minutes 1–2: Placement spot-check
Run a single inbox placement test from your main marketing domain. One test. Look at the Primary / Promotions / Spam split. Write the numbers next to last week's. If Primary dropped by more than 5pp, note it for item 5. If everything looks normal, move on.
Over time you learn what normal looks like for Monday morning on your domain. Some natural variance is fine. A consistent drop over 2–3 weeks isn't.
Minutes 3–4: Postmaster dashboard
Open Google Postmaster Tools. Look at four tiles: domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rate, authentication rate. You're not analysing — you're scanning for change.
- Reputation dropped a tier (High to Medium, Medium to Low) — investigate
- Spam rate crossed 0.2% — trending up, noise or problem?
- Spam rate crossed 0.3% — action required this week
- Auth rate under 99% — something is sending without DKIM/SPF
If nothing changed, close the tab and move on. If something did, note it for item 5.
Minutes 5–6: ESP dashboard numbers
Open your ESP. Look at the last 7 days:
- Sent volume — reasonable compared to last week, or a big jump?
- Bounce rate — under 2% still?
- Complaint rate — under 0.1% still?
- Unsubscribe rate — trending or stable?
- Any error-state sends — rate-limited, deferred, blocked?
You're looking for anomalies, not perfection. A big volume jump last week might be legitimate (a launch campaign) or might be an import gone wrong. Know which.
Minutes 7–8: Support signals
Open your support inbox or ticketing tool. Search the last seven days for three phrases: "didn't receive", "in spam", "can't find the email". Count them. If the count is more than a typical week, you have a deliverability problem showing up in support before it shows up in dashboards.
Support tickets lead metrics by 3–7 days. A sudden increase in "didn't get the password reset" tickets is usually the first sign of a transactional problem. Pay attention.
Minutes 9–10: Weekly log entry
In a single shared doc titled "Email weekly log", write three lines:
- Date + one-line summary: green / yellow / red
- The placement and reputation numbers from items 1 and 2
- Any anomaly worth tracking, with a suggested owner
That's it. 20 weeks later, the doc is a chronological record of how your program evolved, which is invaluable when something goes wrong and someone asks "when did this start?"
Red weeks: what to do
A red week is any week where one of these triggers:
- Placement drops 10pp+ week over week
- Spam rate crosses 0.3%
- Domain reputation drops a tier
- Support ticket count for delivery issues doubles
- New blocklist listing
- Bounce rate crosses 3%
On a red week, the 10-minute ritual expands into a 60-minute investigation. The point of the weekly check is to know the difference between a normal Monday and an investigation Monday without having to think about it.
What you can automate
Most of this can be pushed to Slack with automation, and should be once the ritual becomes routine:
- Weekly placement test via the Inbox Check API, output to Slack
- Postmaster numbers via the Google Postmaster API
- ESP metrics via webhook
- Support ticket search via your helpdesk's search API
Automated delivery is better than manual, but the human ritual of looking at the numbers and writing the log still matters. Dashboards go unread. A 10-minute Monday habit doesn't.
Wire the Monday placement check into an API call that posts results to Slack. Free tier covers weekly cadence; upgrade if you want daily. Or just run the free test in a tab and call it good.
Who owns the ritual
Whoever cares most about deliverability. On a small team, the marketing lead. On a growth team, the email owner. On a product-led team, the onboarding engineer. Not an agency — agencies bill for the time, and the point of the ritual is to be free and habitual. If it becomes a billable task, it stops being a habit.