Help & docs · Understanding your results
The verdict, scores and traffic lights
How the go/no-go verdict is decided, what the three score tiles mean, and where the color thresholds sit.
Last updated 18 July 2026
The top of your dashboard answers one question: can I send? It's a literal traffic light. Green means good to go. Yellow means sending is not advised until you look at something. Red means no: something is actively hurting you.
The light is decided pessimistically: the worst finding across all your infrastructure wins. One domain with a broken SPF record turns the top light even if nine others are perfect, because mailbox providers grade you the same way. You are as deliverable as your weakest live piece.
The three entities
Below the verdict, results split into the three kinds of thing we score:
- Domains. What public DNS says about each domain you track. This is configuration: what you've promised receivers.
- Sending paths. What your delivered emails prove about each route you actually send through. This is behavior: what receivers observed. What a sending path is covers why these are scored separately.
- Received emails. The individual messages, kept as evidence, each with its snapshot of authentication results and content measurements from the moment it arrived.
Domains and paths render as score tiles. The color bands are fixed: green at 80 or above, yellow from 50 to 79, red below 50.
Facts versus opinions
One distinction runs through every results page, and we hold it strictly: objective findings look different from interpretive ones.
"Your DMARC record is missing" is a fact; anyone querying DNS gets the same answer. "Your DMARC policy is weaker than it could be" is a judgment. Both are useful. But we never dress the second up as the first, and the reports mark the difference visually. When a check can't run (a timeout, an unreachable list), it says "could not check" rather than pretending to a verdict.
Reading a report
Each domain, path and email has a report page listing every check with its result. Checks are grouped by how much they matter: critical failures first, then warnings, then minor and cosmetic items, then anything that couldn't be checked, with passing checks collapsed below. The plain-English meaning of each check lives in Every check, explained.
A score is a summary, not the goal. The goal is the verdict going green and staying green, and "staying" is the hard part: scores move when your DNS drifts or a blocklist picks you up, which is what monitoring exists to catch.
Still stuck?
A human reads every message: support@inboxdecay.com. Include your workspace email and the domain in question and you'll usually have an answer within a business day.