About ToolTrusted: ToolTrusted is an independent Email Health Platform — we help you understand, improve and monitor the health of your email. It starts with a free Email Health Check that scores any domain out of 100 across authentication, infrastructure, security and reputation, and extends into the whole email technology ecosystem: deliverability, authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), SMTP infrastructure, email security and verification, and the email marketing platforms most businesses send with. This page explains why we exist, how we test, and who funds the work. We started ToolTrusted because email is the highest-ROI channel most businesses have, yet the guidance online is quietly sponsored, lazily updated, or written by people who have never sent at scale or read the RFCs. You can see the result across our free email-health tools, our hands-on reviews and head-to-head comparisons, and our deliverability and authentication guides.
What the platform actually does: most tools check your email once and hand you a red X. ToolTrusted is different — it measures your email posture from public DNS in about 30 seconds with no setup and no account access, explains every point of your score in plain language (what is wrong, why it matters, and the exact fix), monitors it continuously so you learn the moment something changes and can see the day it changed, and guides you back to verified-good when a problem appears. Every verdict is deterministic, not AI guesswork, and it can always show its work. And we are genuinely independent: we sell no ESP, host no one’s DNS, and run no remediation service — so the only thing we are ever selling you is the truth about your email.
About ToolTrusted’s editorial standards
Every tool we cover is tested in production for at least four weeks before we publish a verdict. We send real campaigns to real seed lists, measure deliverability with independent inbox-placement testing, build at least one non-trivial automation in each tool’s workflow editor, and contact customer support at least twice (once during business hours, once at 2 AM) to time the response. We document the version of the platform we tested and the date we tested it — software changes, and a review from 18 months ago is not a review of today’s product.
How we score
Our scoring uses a five-axis rubric so verdicts are comparable across tools and over time:
- Deliverability — independent seed-list inbox placement; sender reputation policy; authentication setup quality.
- Pricing transparency — what you actually pay at common contact/send volumes; how the price scales; what’s locked behind upgrades.
- Automation depth — workflow builder capability; trigger and condition variety; how powerful the cheapest automation-capable tier is.
- Integration coverage — count and quality of native integrations, especially WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, Stripe, Zapier, and the major form builders.
- Customer support — response time, channel availability per plan, documentation quality.
Each axis is scored 1–5, then averaged. We do not “weight” axes differently because we’d rather be transparent than convenient — a tool with a 5 in pricing and a 1 in deliverability is not a 3-star tool, it is a tool with one fatal flaw, and we’d rather you read the section than the headline. The most common question we get about ToolTrusted is whether commissions quietly sway these numbers; they do not, and the section below explains exactly why.
Conflict of interest and affiliate relationships
We earn commissions from some of the tools we recommend. Every page that contains an affiliate link discloses that fact at the top or bottom of the page, and our Affiliate Disclaimer explains the relationship in full — in line with the FTC’s Endorsement Guides.
What we do not do: take payment from a tool in exchange for a positive review; let a vendor edit, approve, or veto a draft; remove negative findings after a commercial conversation; rank by commission rather than by fit. If a tool refuses to sponsor us and then ranks high here anyway, that’s because we think it’s the right tool for the use case. The same is true in reverse: tools that pay us nothing have appeared in our top-ranked positions, and tools that pay us well have appeared in our “do not recommend” sections.
Who runs ToolTrusted
Readers often ask about ToolTrusted’s team and where our opinions come from. ToolTrusted is a small, independent publication. We’ve spent the past several years building, marketing, and breaking email infrastructure for our own projects and for clients — newsletters in the tens of thousands of subscribers, abandoned-cart flows for online stores, transactional pipelines for SaaS apps. Our work is led by two specialists: Elena Tarrant on email marketing platforms, lifecycle and broadcast email, and ESP comparisons; and Raj Kapoor on deliverability and authentication — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI, and domain and IP warm-up. The opinions on this site are built on that lived experience, not on press releases.
Have we got something wrong?
Tools change. Pricing changes. Features ship. If we’ve reviewed something and the platform has materially improved (or regressed) since, we want to know. Drop us a note via the contact page with the specifics, and we’ll re-test and update the post with a clearly marked revision date. If there’s anything else you’d like to know about ToolTrusted before you trust a recommendation, ask — transparency is the whole point of this site.