Guide · Incident response

Deliverability war room template

A concise agenda, stakeholder scripts, and postmortem outline to keep deliverability incidents calm, fast, and evidence-backed.

Incident agenda

0–5 min · Assemble

SendCheck triage bot posts latest drift alerts, affected domains, and policy diffs to #deliverability-war-room.
Incident commander assigns roles: facilitator, scribe, liaison to marketing/support.

5–15 min · Triage

Review SendCheck score changes, DMARC failure volume, and impacted segments (customer vs. internal).
Check status dashboard for ongoing incidents or maintenance windows.
Document suspected root cause on shared timeline.

15–30 min · Stabilize

Rollback or pause offending senders, adjust SPF includes, or rotate DKIM selectors if compromised.
Update stakeholders via Slack/Email template (see below).
Confirm that SendCheck alerts return to green across key domains.

30–45 min · Communicate

Publish status page update with ongoing actions.
Notify executives and support of customer impact/resolution path.
Schedule follow-up analysis meeting within 48 hours.

Stakeholder update

Subject: Deliverability update – {{domain}}

We detected a drop in DMARC alignment for {{domain}} starting {{timestamp}}. The team isolated the issue to {{root_cause}}. SPF/DKIM/DMARC are now passing again. No customer emails were rejected; however, {{impact_summary}}.

Next steps:
- Monitor SendCheck drift alerts for 24 hours
- Follow up with {{owner}} to prevent regression

— SendCheck deliverability team

Postmortem outline

1. Summary
2. Timeline (with SendCheck alert screenshots)
3. Root cause analysis
4. Customer impact
5. Preventative actions
6. Owners & deadlines

Automate incident creation

SendCheck can post directly into Linear, Jira, or Slack when drift events cross critical thresholds. Add severity-based routing to triage faster.

Explore integrations

Drill frequency

Run quarterly tabletop exercises using this template. Swap in a scenario—spoofing, SPF drift, DKIM key compromise—and capture learnings in your deliverability wiki.