The 10-lookup limit breaks email silently. We count every lookup.
SPF records fail in a uniquely nasty way: add one more marketing tool and authentication quietly returns permerror while everything looks fine. Trustliant resolves the entire include tree, shows exactly where the budget goes, and warns before a client hits the wall.
Recursive lookup accounting
Every include, redirect, a, mx, ptr, and exists mechanism costs one of ten permitted DNS lookups (RFC 7208 §4.6.4). Trustliant walks the whole tree — nested includes and all — with cycle detection, and renders it as an evidence tree a technician can act on: which vendor include costs what, and which are probably stale.
Flattening as a managed decision, not a hack
Flattening (replacing includes with their resolved IP networks) cuts lookups to one or two — but flattened records rot when vendors change their ranges. Trustliant presents flattening as a monitored, reversible recommendation with the maintenance cost stated up front, rather than silently rewriting records.
The classics, caught automatically
+all records that authorize the whole internet. Multiple SPF records (a permerror receivers won't forgive). Includes pointing at domains with no SPF at all. Deprecated ptr mechanisms. Each one becomes a finding with severity, business impact, and the exact corrected record.
For your technicians
Full include-tree visualization with per-node lookup costs, raw records at every level, and permerror detection that mirrors what receivers actually do.
For your clients
“Your email settings were one new tool away from breaking — we fixed the headroom problem before it cost you a single message.”