5 Ways to Check Your Sending Reputation
SendGrid TeamWe always stress the importance of a strong sending reputation. Your sending reputation, or how mailbox providers judge your mail, is driven by 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 harder to get to the inbox.
On the other hand, if recipients engage with your messages, your sending reputation will be stronger, and your messages will be more likely to make it to the inbox. Unfortunately, there’s no single value or score that describes your sending reputation across all mailbox providers. However, there are a few tools, stats, and tips you can use to monitor and better understand your sending reputation.
5 tools to check your sending reputation
While it’s true that there’s no singular score that all mailbox providers use to evaluate your sending, there are some third-party tools and even mailbox-specific tools to help you track your sending reputation. All these tools center on different data sources and attempt to score senders based on their practices and results. As single sources of truth, these scores don’t often tell the entire story, but when used in conjunction with other data points, these can be very helpful in identifying reputation issues. Some tools offering 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. Numbers are calculated on a rolling 30-day average and illustrate where your IP address ranks against other IP addresses. Validity provides this service.
2. BarracudaCentral
Barracuda Networks provides both an IP reputation lookup and domain reputation lookup via their Barracuda Reputation System—a real-time database of IP addresses with “poor” or “good” reputations. You can check your IP score to see if you’ve made the nice or naughty list.
3. TrustedSource
TrustedSource, run by McAfee, provides information on your domain’s email reputation and web reputations as well as affiliations, domain name system, and mail server information. It also provides details on the history, activation, and associations of your domain.
4. Google Postmaster Tools
Google offers Postmaster Tools to senders allowing you to track data on your high-volume sending into Gmail. The helpful data it provides includes IP reputation check, domain reputation check, Gmail delivery errors, and more.
5. Microsoft SNDS
Similar to Google’s Postmaster Tools, Microsoft offers a service called Smart Network Data Services (SDNS). Among the data provided by SNDS is insight into data points like your sending IP’s reputation, how many Microsoft spam traps you deliver to, and your spam complaint rate.
Not every mailbox provider gives you insight into how it views your sending reputation, but 2 of the largest mailbox providers do. Through Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS, you can freely see a day-by-day evaluation of the reputation of the messages these major providers see from you. While Google’s and Microsoft’s view of your sending reputation has no impact on how other providers see your mail, it’s a good bet that troubles at these major providers will be accompanied by similar troubles elsewhere.
Reputation is one part of a healthy email program
While each of these data points is a great help in evaluating your sending reputation, none of them, singularly, tell a complete story. For example, it’s not uncommon to see email senders with Sender Scores around 98–99 still having inboxing problems.
It’s important to know that just because you have a high reputation score from a third party or don’t have any deny listings, it doesn’t mean you won’t get throttled, sent to the spam folder, or blocked outright.
When considered together, the scores from the tools above and the insights and tips recommended below will give you a very good idea of how your current sending reputation stands with mailbox providers.
Review your statistics over time to identify trends
All senders’ reputations change over time.
Understanding how your statistics trend is critical to understanding how your overall reputation changes. Since sending reputation is all about how much of your email makes it to the inbox, seeing trends like decreasing open rates or increasing spam complaint rates tend to be the most reliable indicators of existing or pending reputation degradation.
Conversely, seeing improving delivery or open rates over time can indicate an improvement in your sending reputation. Since each mailbox provider operates a little bit differently, it’s even more helpful if you can keep an eye on these changes on a domain-by-domain basis to identify specific reputation issues at specific providers.
Look for IP and domain deny listings regularly
When your email sending generates too many negative signals, such as spam complaints or delivery to spam traps or honeypot addresses, it’s likely you’ll see increased denylistings of your IP, your domain, or both. While not all denylists have a significant impact on your delivery rates, seeing increases in denylisting events for your sending is an indicator your sending reputation is suffering. A great, free tool to use to keep an eye out for denylistings is https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx.
Send yourself messages
It’s never a bad idea to send yourself messages as if you were a recipient.
If you have multiple email addresses at different mailbox providers, send to them all. While you can never make broad assumptions about how a mailbox provider treats all your mail based on results to a single address, seeing changes in how your emails land in your inboxes or spam folders can be a good indication that your reputation may be degrading, especially when combined with other data points. Just remember to do yourself a favor and positively engage with your messages. If they do land in your spam folder, pull them back into your inbox.
Improve your sending reputation proactively
While these tools help you check your sending reputation, domain reputation, IP reputation, spam score, and the like, senders typically only use them reactively. Once they notice a problem, that’s when they start getting concerned about reputation authority.
Regardless of your scores, be proactive about protecting your reputation. Follow email best practices to keep yourself on good terms with all the inbox providers.
Twilio SendGrid also provides a few tools to help you take control of your sender reputation:
Email Testing
SendGrid’s Email Testing tool helps you send emails with confidence by catching errors before you press Send.
- Spam score checker: We’ll analyze your emails and alert you to spammy-looking content that’s likely to trigger spam filters with this tool. We’ll also run your email through a few of the most popular spam check platforms to give you a good idea of how your content will perform.
- Link checker: We’ll crawl your email to ensure you don’t send a message with broken links, checking every URL with a single link to ensure it goes to the right place. We’ll even make recommendations if your link directs to a site with a poor domain reputation or too many redirects.
- Inbox render test: We’ll show you how your email will look across clients, browsers, and devices to ensure your message looks great no matter where it gets opened.
Email Address Validation API
SendGrid’s Email Address Validation IP helps improve your email deliverability by validating email addresses before you send. Our real-time API monitors your email list to ensure mistyped, inactive, nonexistent, and disposable 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 Insights
SendGrid’s Deliverability Insights provides you with a single dashboard to monitor and improve your email program. You can check email deliverability metrics at a glance and see the data the matters most.
It’s all packaged into an actionable and easy-to-digest format. That means you don’t have to waste time digging through menus and tabs to find the data you need.
Take control of your sending reputation with Twilio SendGrid
Your email reputation is always in your control. Take advantage of these tools and tactics to gain more accurate visibility into how the mailbox providers view your mail. These data points signal whether your mail gets to the intended recipients. So the more proactive you can be with your email deliverability, the better.
If you’re interested in having a partner to help with your sending reputation and email deliverability, check out Twilio SendGrid. Our Expert Services offer over 130 years of combined email industry experience to ensure your email program is set up for success.
