Top 5 Ways to Check your Email Reputation

Reputation is an oft-used term in the realm of sending email. We encourage those sending email marketing, newsletters, or other legitimate emails to have a good sending reputation, but we rarely explain what that is, or how to measure your sending reputation, in any detail.

Here's a brief explainer that I hope will get you started on understanding what reputation is and how to measure and monitor it. Keep in mind that the topic of reputation is broad and complex; I'll scratch the surface, but there's only so much room to stuff all of that into a single blog post without it becoming 200 pages long.

When we talk about having a good reputation, that means engaging in email sending practices that will result, basically, in mailbox providers (like Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail/Outlook) "liking" you. Meaning that their view of you through their spam filtering lens is a positive one. You're not found wanting; your score, as calculated by them, suggests that you send wanted and engaging mail. That you do not send unwanted mail that annoys recipients or fails to connect with them.

At its core; it's that simple: Send wanted and engaging messages, only to those who ask for your email messages. The top mailbox providers mandate a set of technical requirements, too (so read, understand and comply with them), but keep in mind that mail can be technically perfect, but still unwanted. Mailbox providers attempt to identify (and filter out or block) unwanted mail, through monitoring of metrics around engagement (low is bad) and complaints (high is bad).

How you monitor your success (or failure) as an email sender, how you monitor your reputation, is complex. There is no single queryable dashboard to check, because spam filters are mostly internal black boxes running internally behind email platforms hosting mailboxes, the inner workings of, and resulting scores from, not directly exposed to the world. So if you want to know if you've got a good sending reputation, you've got to piece it together, from a number of possible things to check, keeping in mind that not every check might apply to every possible way email delivery (and successful inbox placement) can be impacted.

So if you want to check to see what your sending reputation is, here are the top five ways you can do that, in my estimation.

1. Use a deliverability testing service, like Inbox Monster, Everest by Validity, or GlockApps. At the core of most of these platforms is functionality called inbox testing or seedlist testing where they give you a list of addresses to include in your email sends. Not to fool filters, but just to measure. They control all the addresses in question; programmatically retrieving mail from each address to build you a graphical report showing message disposition across multiple mailbox providers for the email campaign or newsletter you've sent. The downsides are that this can be expensive, and occasionally imperfect thanks to things like individualistic filtering. The biggest upside, though, is that this pulls together a lot of deliverability results, from a lot of mailbox providers, all at once. Did your mail go to the inbox folder or the spam folder? This helps you know that.
2. Check your sending IP address and domain names against the Spamhaus blocklists. Spamhaus is the most widely used blocklist out there and is widely subscribed to. Meaning that if you're listed here by IP or domain, you're likely to have deliverability issues. DO NOT assume that this is true of every other blocklist you check. Those "check 88 blocklist" tools are better at generating FUD than actually giving you actionable feedback on potential deliverability problems. You do NOT care that you're listed on "Bob's Wacky Blocklist (BWBL)" or whatever; these dozens of random blocklists are not broadly used.
3. Check your reputation using Validity's Sender Score and Cisco Talos. Low scores here do not directly correlate with a delivery problem at a top mailbox provider, but they're potentially good "canary in a coal mine" warnings that your sends could be causing negative feedback that will eventually cause deliverability issues.
4. Sign up for Google Postmaster Tools (everyone with a domain who sends email to Gmail subscribers should do this) and Microsoft SNDS (if you're using an email sending platform that gives you dedicated IP addresses. GPT is extremely useful for understanding what Gmail thinks of you as an email sender. Microsoft's SNDS is a little more specific only to certain use cases (and doesn't always reflect what Microsoft's own filters think of you), but still can provide useful feedback.
5. If you can't afford to pay for the deliverability monitoring mentioned above in step one, set up what I call "poor man's monitoring," which means creating your own specific Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Outlook.com email accounts and add them to your email list and include them in your campaign or newsletter sends. You don't have to check each account every time you send, but you should check in periodically, logging in to the account every once in a while to see which folder the mail is landing in (inbox or spam/bulk/junk).

Bonus: Test for your own technical compliance by using a third party testing tool like the fantastic and free aboutmy.email. Just keep in mind that technical compliance does not guarantee inbox delivery. It's still an important part of the reputation equation, though, so it's important to get the technical bits correct.

And if you want to learn more about reputation, read the blogs and email newsletters! Not just my own Spam Resource (email newsletter signup here, hint hint), but also others like Lauren Meyer's Send It Right (who talks about the topic on the regular) and Simon Harper covers it often in his All About Email newsletter, too.

And that is just a start, and only a taste of what I could say about email reputation. There are other useful things that I didn't even touch on here, but if you keep on reading the blog, I'm sure I've shared many of the others along the way, and I'll keep trying to do so in the future.