Email delivery problems are diagnosable. Most go undiagnosed.
Either way, the starting point is the same: understand what is actually happening before deciding what to do about it.
I work with organizations running permission-based email programs to diagnose active delivery failures, audit programs that have never been formally reviewed, and provide ongoing technical oversight for teams that want someone watching the infrastructure on a consistent basis.
The free 30-minute assessment is the right place to start. It ends with a clear recommendation, not a sales pitch.
The right engagement depends on what is happening with your program.
Triage
Messages are going to spam. Delivery rates are dropping. A provider block with no useful error message. Something changed, and it is not clear what.
Triage identifies the cause of the problem, explains it in plain language, and gives you specific actions to take. Delivered in five business days.
Recovery
Delivery has failed in a meaningful way. Fixes you have tried have not worked, or you do not know where to start. The problem is too complex and too consequential to resolve with a single assessment.
Recovery is a 45-day structured engagement: root cause identification, guided remediation, and documented progress at every stage.
Clarity
The program is working, or seems to be. But authentication records were set up years ago and may have drifted. A significant change is coming. Or you want documentation of the current technical state before something goes wrong.
Clarity is a comprehensive review of a functioning program, delivered as a risk-ranked report and a prioritized remediation plan.
Counsel
The program is in good shape. Delivery is solid. But email deliverability is not a problem that stays solved on its own: authentication standards evolve, provider filtering changes, and sending patterns drift.
Counsel is a fixed monthly engagement with a defined hour allocation for questions, change reviews, and escalation support if a problem develops.
For ESPs and Sending Platforms
Running a sending platform means owning the abuse function, not just the infrastructure. If complaint handling runs on institutional memory, if your team is triaging by feel, or if a blocklist operator has ever asked for your documentation and the answer was uncomfortable, the function is not where it needs to be.
Sentinel
The abuse function exists. It may have a name, a dedicated inbox, and someone assigned to it. But if it has never been formally assessed, you do not know what it is missing until something goes wrong.
Sentinel is a ten-business-day review of your current operations, policy, tooling, and external relationships, delivered as a prioritized roadmap your team can act on.
Bastion
You know what needs to be built, or have a general sense of it. Either way, the gap between where your abuse program is and where it needs to be is not something a document can close.
Bastion is a 90-day engagement in which I operate as a fractional abuse program lead to establish complaint-handling workflows, enforce acceptable use, and manage blocklist operator relationships. All built and documented under the guidance of someone who has been there.
I am Mickey Chandler. Before starting Whizardries, I spent more than a decade at the policy level inside major email service providers, developing and enforcing the standards that marketing programs had to live by. I hold CIPP/US and CIPM privacy certifications. I also operate Lex Protego PLLC, a separate privacy law practice. When a deliverability problem has a legal dimension, I recognize it and say so.
Whizardries works with senders committed to consent-based practices. That is not a preference. It is how the practice is scoped. Organizations willing to commit to permission-based email are welcome, regardless of where they start, and no matter how imperfect their programs are today.
If it is not clear which engagement fits your situation, the free 30-minute assessment is the right place to start. It ends with a clear recommendation — including an honest answer if none of the paid engagements is the right fit.