We always emphasize the importance of a strong shipping reputation. Your sending reputation, or how mailbox providers judge your mail, depends on how your subscribers react to your messages. If the messages you send generate a lot of spam complaints, your sending reputation will worsen and future messages will be more difficult to reach the inbox.
on the other hand, if recipients are engaged with your messages, your sending reputation will be stronger and your messages will be more likely to make it to the inbox. Unfortunately, there is no single value or score that describes your sending reputation across all mailbox providers. however, there are some tools, stats, and tips you can use to better monitor and understand your sending reputation.
While it’s true that there isn’t a single score that all mailbox providers use to assess your sending, there are some third-party tools and even mailbox-specific tools that help you track your sending reputation. All of these tools are based on different data sources and try to rate senders based on their practices and results. As single sources of truth, these scores often don’t tell the whole story, but when used in conjunction with other data points, they can be very helpful in identifying reputation issues. Some tools that offer reputation scores are:
1. senderscore.org
Like a credit score, a sender score is a measure of your reputation. Sender Score gives you a score from 0 to 100. The higher your score, the better your reputation and the higher your email deliverability rate. The numbers are calculated on a 30-day moving average and illustrate where your IP address ranks compared to other IP addresses. This service is provided for validity.
2. central barracuda
barracuda networks provides both an ip reputation lookup and a domain reputation lookup through its barracuda reputation system, a real-time database of ip addresses with “bad” or “good” reputations. you can check your ip score to see if you are on the good or bad list.
3. trusted source
TrustedSource, managed by mcafee, provides information about your domain’s email reputation and web reputation, as well as affiliations, domain name system (dns), and mail server information. it also provides details about your domain’s history, activation, and associations.
4. google postmaster tools
google offers its postmaster tools to senders, allowing you to track data from your high volume of gmail submissions. the useful data they provide includes ip reputation check, domain reputation check, gmail delivery errors and more.
5. microsoft snds
just like google postmaster tools, microsoft offers a service called intelligent network data services (sdns). Among the data provided by snds is information on data points such as the reputation of your sending ip, how many microsoft spam traps you are sending to, and your rate of spam complaints.
Not all mailbox providers give you information about how they view your sending reputation, but two of the largest mailbox providers do. Through the Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDs tools, you can freely view a daily reputation assessment of the messages these major providers see from you. While Google and Microsoft’s opinion of your sending reputation has no impact on how other providers see your mail, it’s a good bet that problems at these top providers will be accompanied by similar problems elsewhere.
reputation is a part of a healthy email program
While each of these data points is helpful in assessing your sending reputation, none of them, on their own, tell a complete story. for example, it’s not uncommon to see email senders with Sender Scores around 98-99 still having inbox issues.
It’s important to know that just because you have a high reputation score from a third party or no denied listings doesn’t mean you won’t be throttled, spammed, or blocked altogether. .
When taken together, the scores from the tools above and the recommended ideas and tips below will give you a pretty good idea of where your current sending reputation stands with mailbox providers.
review your statistics over time to identify trends
The reputation of all senders changes over time.
Understanding the trends in your statistics is critical to understanding how your overall reputation is changing. Since sending reputation is about how much of your email makes it to the inbox, seeing trends like declining open rates or increasing spam complaint rates tend to be the most reliable indicators of the Degradation of existing or pending reputation.
Conversely, seeing an improvement in delivery or open rates over time may indicate that your sending reputation is improving. Since every mailbox provider works a little differently, it’s even more helpful if you can monitor these changes on a domain-by-domain basis to identify specific reputation issues on specific providers.
regularly check the lists of ip and denied domains
When your email send generates too many negative signals, such as spam complaints or delivery to spam traps or trap addresses, you’ll likely see an increase in your IP, domain, or both rejection lists. While not all deny lists have a significant impact on your delivery rates, seeing increases in deny list events for your shipment is an indicator that your sending reputation is suffering. An excellent free tool for keeping an eye out for deny lists is https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx.
send yourself messages
It’s never a bad idea to message yourself as a recipient.
If you have multiple email addresses at different mailbox providers, send them all. While you can never make broad assumptions about how a mailbox provider treats all of your mail based on results in a single address, seeing changes in the way your emails arrive in their inboxes or mail folders can’t help. desired can be a good indication that your reputation may be demeaning, especially when combined with other data points. just remember to do yourself a favor and engage positively with your posts. if they land in your spam folder, put them back in your inbox.
improve your shipping reputation proactively
While these tools help you check your sending reputation, domain reputation, ip reputation, spam score, and the like, senders generally only use them reactively. once they notice a problem, that’s when they start to worry about the reputation authority.
Regardless of your scores, be proactive about protecting your reputation. Follow email best practices to stay on good terms with all inbox providers.
twilio sendgrid also provides some tools to help you monitor your sender reputation:
- email tests
- email address validation api
- deliverability insights
email test
twilio sendgrid’s email testing tool helps you send email with confidence by detecting errors before you hit “send”.
- Spam Score Checker: The tool will scan your emails and alert you to content that appears to be spam and is likely to trigger spam filters. we’ll check your email through some of the most popular spam checking platforms to give you a good idea of how your content will perform.
- link checker: we’ll track your email email to make sure you don’t send a message with broken links. you can check each url with a single link to make sure you go to the right place. we’ll even make recommendations if your link leads to a site with a poor domain reputation or too many redirects.
- inbox processing test: we show you how your email will look email clients, browsers, and devices to ensure your message looks great no matter where it’s opened.
email address validation api
twilio sendgrid’s email address validation ip helps improve your email deliverability by validating email addresses before sending. our real-time api monitors your email list to ensure misspelled, dead, non-existent, and throwaway emails don’t join.
A clean list reduces your bounce rates and improves your sending reputation with mailbox providers. and that means better delivery rates for you.
deliverability outlook
twilio sendgrid deliverability information gives you a single dashboard to monitor and improve your email program. you can check email deliverability metrics at a glance and see the most important data.
everything is packaged in an actionable, easy-to-digest format. That means you don’t have to waste time digging through menus and tabs to find the data you need.
takeaway
Your email reputation is always under your control. Take advantage of these tools and tactics to gain more accurate visibility into how mailbox providers view your mail. these data points indicate whether or not recipients consider your mail to be spam. so the more proactive you can be with your email deliverability, the better.
If you’re interested in having a partner help you with your sending reputation and email deliverability, check out sendgrid. our expert services offer over 130 years of combined email industry experience to ensure your email program is set up for success.