Stop hurting your deliverability — flag risky domains before you hit send
Cold email deliverability issues don’t usually come from bad messaging—they come from bad data. Risky domains with no inboxes, recent registrations, or spam traps can quietly wreck your sender reputation before your campaign even gets off the ground.
This Claybook helps you stop that at the source.
But first, here’s a quick refresher on some key technical terms you’ll see throughout this workflow:
For RevOps, Demand Gen, and Deliverability teams, the challenge is always the same: how do you catch these risks before the damage is done?
So we created this Claybook to automate domain risk detection before you press send.
It’s a modular workflow that transforms raw domain lists into clean, enriched, and fully risk-assessed records—so you can protect your sender score and filter with confidence.
1. Domain Intake: Start with any list of emails or domains—Clay parses and normalizes them automatically.
2. Email Config Check: Confirm valid MX records and assess TTL to gauge email readiness and potential red flags.
3. WHOIS Metadata: Pull domain age, expiration timing, and change history to spot sketchy or disposable domains.
4. Risk Detection: Use tools like Hunter.io to flag trap domains, catch-alls, and other high-risk patterns.
5. Aggregated Scoring: Combine all risk signals into a simple “Domain Red Flags” column to make fast decisions.
With this Claybook, you can avoid three of the most common outbound killers:
Silent Deliverability Decay: Catch dangerous domains early—before they degrade your sender reputation.
Add WHOIS or domain metadata enrichments to pull:
Use Hunter.io (or similar) to check for:
Start identifying, analyzing, and cleaning risky email domains to improve your deliverability and protect your sender reputation.
Check out Clay University, read our GTM blog, or try out our top templates to transform your growth ideas into outreach in minutes.