If you are or plan on doing in-house mailing, there are a handful of tools and services you shouldn't go without.

DNS Stuff

DNS Stuff is truly a must-have for all do it yourself email marketers. It features a wide range of tools meant to check if your DNS and PTR records are set up properly, alerts you by email or SMS the instant your IPs are blacklisted by major anti-spam networks and allows you to troubleshoot and diagnose your email servers when they fail. If you are maintaining your own mail servers, you can't live without it.

They offer a 7 to 14 day free trial so you can fully test their platform and see if it suits your needs. To learn more about the services and products offered by DNS Stuff have a look at https://www.dnsstuff.com/products.

SenderBase®

SenderBase is the world’s largest email monitoring network. It provides a nice service for monitoring email volumes per domain, allows you to look up the reputations of various networks, has statistics on top virus and spam senders and can tell you whether your network poses a high threat and is likely to be blocked by spam filters.

SenderBase is backed up by more than 100,000 contributing organizations world-wide, which equates to an unmatched view of how email gets sent around the Internet. It is a free service, courtesy of IronPort Email and Web Security.

MX Toolbox

MX Toolbox comes with a series of tools that allow you to do various lookups on a domain. You can check the IP or host name for reputation, get the DNS MX record for the domain, check SPF or TXT records, get the IP address block information for the domain (useful for learning who the uplink is).

A feature you will find particularly useful is the up-to-date blacklist checker that puts to shame a majority of RBL checkers out there. It lists only the services that spam filters use these days – and does a pretty great job too.

Next to these free services, you will also enjoy a series of paid ones: MX Toolbox offers email archiving, hosting and delivery services as well. You can have a look at their premium products here: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/Public/Content/Products/.

As you probably noticed, some are commercial and a few cost a lot. If you aren’t ready to spend that kind of money on your mailouts, it might be better to outsource your email campaigns. Don’t expect to simply invest a bit and pull tenfold worth of revenue almost right away, even if you have a large list. It can take you months to segment your list to get the optimal ROI. I have already explained the pros and cons of each in an article last year, why don’t you go back and have a look at it?