Why Email Reputation is Important & Top 5 Tools to Check Your Sender Reputation Score

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Gone are the times when email filters only checked the message’s content to filter out the email as spam or deliver it in the Inbox. Today, Internet service providers are more concerned about the email integrity, sender’s authenticity, and email reputation. They automatically assess the reputation of the sender analyzing each incoming email and the recipient’s reaction to it. The email reputation score then influences the way the message is handled: delivered, filtered, or blocked.

Email senders may find this system inconvenient as sometimes an important email gets mislabeled as spam or blocked outright, and the subscribers can miss it. Fortunately, there are known practices for  maintaining a good email reputation and numerous tools for monitoring your email sender reputation to ensure your crucial emails are delivered in the Inbox.

5 Reasons Why Email Reputation Is Important

Email senders should not underestimate the impact of email reputation for deliverability. Getting a couple of emails filtered out to Spam is one thing and seeing almost all email communications sent to Junk or being rejected due to the reputation issue is a different picture. 

Therefore, organizations should be concerned about maintaining a good email sender reputation. By positioning themselves as good senders with ISPs, email senders can:

#1. Avoid Email Blocking.

Poor email reputation can prevent the messages from being sent. As a rule, the emails bounce back with a description about a low sender domain or sender IP reputation. This means that the email provider refuses to send the messages because the reputation of the sender is very low. This measure is taken by some ISPs to stop unsolicited communications and penalize bad actors. 

#2. Get Emails Delivered in the Inbox. 

Serious email reputation issues can lead to the inability of the sender to get their messages delivered to the intended recipients. The higher the email reputation score, more emails go to the Inbox. Senders with a good sending history can benefit from better Inbox placement ratios than senders having a poor reputation score.

#3. Send Emails without Throttling Issues.

In some scenarios, email senders with poor reputations may be affected by the email throttling mechanism utilized by ISPs. This means that the messages get delivered to the target recipients hours after they are sent. Email recipients may miss a time-limited offer or other timely information in the email because of this.

#4. Create Good Brand Image.

Your brand image is also impacted by the email sender reputation. If your emails end up in their Spam folder, your clients might think your business is unreliable as you don’t care about your deliverability. 

#5. Get More Opens and Clicks.

When filtered out as spam, the email may be overlooked by the majority of your recipients. Additionally, people are less inclined to interact with content that has been flagged as spam. This impacts your open rates. On the opposite side, a high email reputation ensures a good Inbox rate, which, in turn, helps get better user interaction.

IP Reputation vs Email Domain Reputation

IP address reputation and email domain reputation are the two primary criteria that ISPs employ to assess email reputation. By being aware of what is evaluated to calculate the IP and domain reputation score, you can pinpoint the factors affecting the reputation of either and address them.

IP Address Reputation

Email messages are sent from servers with assigned IP addresses. The IP address the message originates from is present in the message’s headers. By knowing the sender’s IP address, email receivers can find out the sending history behind this IP. The reputation of an IP address is assessed using a variety of email analytics, such as:

• bounce rates;
• emails caught by spam filters;
• emails identified as bulk unsolicited messages;
• emails sent to spam trap addresses.

It is important to understand that email service providers use pools of shared IP addresses for their clients. The reputation of each shared IP is established and impacted by the sending history of each sender sharing the IP. This implies that your deliverability may suffer if another sender in the same IP address pool behaves badly. 

Requesting a dedicated IP address from your email service provider can be costly but it may solve your deliverability issues. You can start building your email reputation with a fresh start thanks to this tactic.

Email Domain Reputation

An email domain is owned by the email sender. Thus, the reputation of an email domain is established based on the particular sender’s habits. An email domain reputation is influenced by numerous factors, including:

• domain authentication – SPF and DKIM – that confirms the authenticity of the sender;
• recipient engagement;
• user-reported spam rate;
• emails sent to inactive users;
• domain age;
• volume of emails sent from the domain;
• sending frequency.

You can change your IP address by switching to a different email service provider, but changing the domain is not easy. Therefore, it’s crucial to build a good email reputation, monitor the reputation, and take the measures to restore the email reputation if it worsens.

Top 5 Tools to Check Email Sender Reputation

How to find out what my email reputation is? Marketers often ask this question when they start having email deliverability issues. It’s important to understand that there is no single email reputation score because each ISP calculates it differently.

However, there are different tools and services that gather the sending history for an IP address or domain and calculate the reputation score for it. Email reputation tools can be a good source of reference when your open rates suffer.

Here are the top 5 resources you can consider for your email sender reputation check:

1. Sender Score.

Sender Score returns the reputation score for an IP address. The tool assigns a score between 0 and 100 to an IP sending emails. IP addresses with a score of 80 or higher are regarded as good senders, while a score from 70 to 80 is a fair reputation score. IP addresses with a score from 0 to 70 may have trouble with email deliverability.

Sender Score considers a variety of characteristics to calculate an IP sender score, such as:

• appearance of the IP on blacklists;
• user reported spam emails;
• rejected emails;
• emails filtered out as spam;
• emails sent to spam traps;
• emails sent to invalid recipients;
• fluctuations on the sending frequency.

2. GlockApps Postmaster.

GlockApps Postmaster presents email reputation data collected by Google Postmaster. It shows all the valuable email reputation metrics and allows you to instantly find out the reputation of your domain and sending IPs. 

In the Postmaster tool, you can get the following information about your email sender reputation:

• user reported spam rate;
• sending IP reputation level;
• domain reputation level;
• user complaint rate (feedback loops);
• success rate for DKIM, SPF, and DMARC;
• delivery errors.

GlockApps Postmaster also notices the recent changes in the metrics and shows the changes in the main dashboard. 

3. Microsoft SNDS.

Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) helps senders with dedicated IP addresses monitor their email metrics with Microsoft Outlook. Although the SNDS report doesn’t show the IP reputation score, this service lets senders access a broad range of data for the sending IP address, including: 

• outbound email traffic;
• email filtering level: low, medium, high.
• user complaint ratio;
• spam trap hits.

Microsoft’s SNDS saves this data for 90 days so you can analyze trends and pinpoint the major issues with your outbound emails that can cause deliverability problems with Microsoft’s domains.

4. BarracudaCentral.

The Barracuda Reputation System maintains a database of IP addresses with a bad sender reputation and URLs with poor reputation. This allows the Barracuda spam and virus firewall tool to identify and block any email containing poorly-rated URLs in the content. 

Barracuda Reputation System may flag an IP address as bad for a variety of reasons, such as:

• email authentication settings are not set up correctly;
• computer or email server has been infected by a virus;
• IP address was previously used by a known spammer;
• too many bulk emails have been sent from the IP. 

You can check an IP and domain email reputation with the Barracuda Reputation System by doing the IP or domain lookup on their site.  

5. GlockApps Inbox Insight.

The GlockApps Inbox Insight tester provides a report with valuable information about the sending system configuration, reputation, and email placement including:

• sending IPs reputation with the IP blacklisting status;
• email domain reputation;
• email authentication: SPF, DKIM, DMARC;
• email spam score;
• email placement with various ISPs across the world.

The reports are stored in the system for one year, which allows you to notice the trends and changes in your deliverability over time. With automated tests, you can set email testing on auto-pilot and receive alerts when the desired Inbox rate is not achieved.

Takeaways

Email sender reputation is what makes your messages be delivered in the Inbox or filtered out to Spam. It’s important to start building a good email reputation when you are starting with email communications and maintain email reputation at a high level throughout the email lifecycle. 

With the utilization of different tools and services that keep track of the activity coming from the IP addresses and domains, you can monitor your email sender reputation and test your email deliverability in order to catch the issues at the very beginning before they turn out to be serious problems.