My GlockApps inbox placement jumped 32 points after fixing one DNS record here is what was wrong
dmarc_fixer_nia · 2026-06-23 · 1,060 views
Been sending cold email for 18 months. Knew about SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Had all three passing on MXToolbox. Still saw 61% inbox placement on GlockApps. Something was off.
Spent a week diagnosing. Found the problem. Sharing it because I've seen at least three other people in this community describe the exact same symptom.
The problem: DMARC was passing but alignment was failing.
MXToolbox shows whether individual checks pass. It doesn't always surface alignment failures clearly. DMARC requires that your SPF domain or DKIM domain aligns with the From header domain, not just that they pass individually.
What was happening in my case: my sending provider was signing DKIM with a selector tied to their own infrastructure domain, not mine. So DKIM passed, but the signing domain was the provider's, not my sending domain. DMARC alignment failed silently while the individual check showed green.
The fix.
Set up DKIM signing using my own domain's selector. If you're on PuzzleInbox or standard Google Workspace, this is handled automatically and this problem won't happen. I was on a different provider at the time that used shared DKIM infrastructure.
After confirming alignment was correct, I also tightened my DMARC policy from p=none to p=quarantine.
The result.
GlockApps placement went from 61% to 93% in the same week. Reply rate went from 1.2% to 3.6% on the same copy and the same list. The email was always good enough. It just wasn't arriving where it needed to.
Three months of thinking I had a copy problem. I had an alignment problem the whole time.
Run your domains through GlockApps before every campaign. Not MXToolbox alone. Inbox placement is the number that matters, not whether the DNS checks show green.