5 Ways to Check Your Sending Reputation
We always stress the importance of a strong sending reputation. By keeping an eye on your engagement (opens, clicks TiNs, etc.) and reputation (spam complaints, spam traps, unknown users, etc.) metrics you’ll get a good picture of how your emails are being received by subscribers.
But if you’re looking for another measure of your reputation, you can take advantage of a handful of resources that will let you know where you stand. Here are 5 sites that will help you check your sending reputation and keep you on track:
Like a credit score, a Sender Score is a measure of your reputation. Scores are calculated 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. This service is provided by Return Path.
Senderbase is a product of Cisco and provides you with the tools to check your reputation by ranking you as Good, Neutral, or Poor. Good means there is little or no threat activity. Neutral means your IP address or domain is within acceptable parameters, but may still be filtered or blocked. Poor means there is a problematic level of threat activity and you are likely to be filtered or blocked.
WatchGuard’s ReputationAuthority helps protect business and government organizations from unwanted email and web traffic that contain spam, malware, spyware, malicious code, and phishing attacks. You can look up your IP address or domain, receive a reputation score from 0-100, and get the percentage of emails that were good versus bad.
IP lookup for ReputationAuthority
Barracuda Networks provides both an IP and domain reputation lookup via their Barracuda Reputation System; a real-time database of IP addresses with “poor” or “good” reputations.
TrustedSource is a site very similar to senderbase.org, but run by McAfee. It provides information on both your domain’s email and web reputations as well as affiliations, domain name system (DNS), and mail server information. It also provides details on the history, activation, and associations of your domain.
Takeaways
Your email reputation is always in your control. By taking advantage of these resources, you can ensure that you’re being proactive about your email deliverability. But our delivery team likes to emphasize that while these reputation monitoring systems are a great help, they are not the authoritative metric by which you should determine the health of your entire email program.
They are best used as one data point (an important one) in an overarching holistic assessment of your email program. It is not uncommon to see senders with SenderScores around 98-99 that are still having inboxing problems, so it’s important to know that just because you get a high score on one of these sites, it doesn’t mean you won’t be getting throttled, sent to the spam folder, or blocked outright. So the more eyes and ears you can have on your IP and domain reputation the better.
