Email programs decay. Domains age, DNS records drift, lists stale out, new vendors join SPF without anyone noticing, and the person who originally set up DKIM leaves the company. Three years in, most companies are running their marketing through infrastructure nobody fully understands. The quarterly health review exists to keep that from happening. It's not a deliverability project — it's the maintenance that prevents needing one.
Four meetings a year, 45 minutes each, same six-item agenda, one owner, one shared doc. If your email program is over two years old and you don't have this on the calendar, put it there before Friday.
When to schedule it
Pick a recurring date that falls in a low-volume week for your business. For B2B SaaS that's usually mid-January, mid-April, mid-July, and mid-October. For e-commerce you want it far away from Q4 push, so February, May, August, November. Lock it on the calendar for the whole year at once — if you leave it to "whenever we have time", you will skip it three quarters out of four.
Invite four people: whoever owns email infrastructure (engineer or admin), whoever runs campaigns (marketer), whoever cares about the numbers (growth/CMO), and one rotating observer (product, support, or a founder). The observer rotates because fresh eyes catch things the regulars have stopped noticing.
The six-item agenda
Every meeting follows the same agenda. Print it, pin it, never change it. The consistency is the point — if Q3 looks different from Q1, you'll miss trend lines.
- Infrastructure snapshot (10 min)
- Placement and reputation (10 min)
- List health (5 min)
- Incidents since last quarter (10 min)
- Upcoming sender-affecting changes (5 min)
- Action items and owners (5 min)
1. Infrastructure snapshot
A one-page summary of the sending setup as it stands today. Which ESPs are we using and for what? Which domains send which categories of mail (marketing, transactional, sales, billing)? What are the current SPF/DKIM/DMARC records? Any subdomains we forgot about? The first time you do this the doc takes an hour to build. Every quarter after that, it takes ten minutes to update.
2. Placement and reputation
Pull the numbers from the same sources each quarter: Gmail Postmaster (domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rate, authentication rate), Microsoft SNDS if you have a dedicated IP, and one fresh inbox placement test across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and any regional providers you care about. Record them in the same table you used last quarter so the trend is obvious.
Free inbox placement test gives you the quarterly snapshot across 20+ providers in under a minute. Or wire it into the meeting cadence via the API so results are already in the doc when you walk in.
3. List health
Three numbers from the ESP: active subscriber count, 90-day inactive count, and bounce rate on the last three campaigns. If active is growing but inactive is growing faster, your list is getting heavier — that's a re-engagement or suppression conversation. If bounce rate is climbing quarter over quarter, something upstream in lead capture is broken.
4. Incidents since last quarter
Any deliverability-affecting event since the last meeting? Blocklist listing, ESP switch, domain migration, authentication change, spam report surge, postmaster alert, sudden reply-rate drop? One line per incident: what happened, what we did, what we learned. Even "nothing notable" deserves its own line — it establishes a baseline.
5. Upcoming sender-affecting changes
What's on the roadmap in the next 90 days that could affect email? Rebrand, domain purchase, new ESP, new sending workflow, big volume event (Black Friday, tax season, product launch), new regulatory requirement (Yahoo sender rules, DMARC tightening). Mark each one with a risk level: low, medium, high. High-risk items become their own mini-project with a dedicated meeting.
6. Action items and owners
Every action item gets a specific human owner and a date due before the next quarterly meeting. No items due "someday". No items owned by "the team". A reasonable meeting produces 3–6 action items. Track them in the same shared doc and close them one by one.
What this meeting is not
It is not a campaign performance review — that's marketing's weekly meeting. It is not a technical incident review — those happen when incidents happen. It is not a blame session — nothing gets done if people are defensive. It is a calm, 45-minute look at the health of one specific system, with the same six questions asked the same way every quarter.
Running it for the first time
The first meeting will overrun. Budget 90 minutes, not 45. You're building the baseline documents, and that always takes longer than it looks. From the second meeting onward, 45 minutes is comfortable as long as you resist the temptation to solve things in the meeting. The meeting exists to surface problems and assign owners, not to fix them live.