What is Email Sender Reputation? How to Fix It

Your email sender reputation substantially affects your messages' journey to either the inbox or spam folders. Research shows that US workers receive around 121 emails daily. While 95% of users check their general inbox, only 58% ever look at their spam folder.

Deliverability takes a dramatic hit once your sender reputation score drops below 80. Many businesses face challenges with high bounce rates and spam complaints. Low user involvement compounds these issues and damages your sender reputation further.

Let us help you boost your email deliverability. This piece walks you through checking your email reputation score and spotting issues that hurt your sender score. You'll discover proven strategies to repair your email sender reputation and improve deliverability through 2025 and beyond.

What is email sender reputation?

Email sender reputation works like your trustworthiness score in the email world. Email service providers (ESPs) use this score to decide if your messages should land in the inbox or get marked as spam.

Your reputation comes from two key parts:

1. IP reputation - This connects to your email sending IP address. Most people use shared IPs from their ESP, while dedicated IPs work better for those who send lots of emails. Each IP carries its own reputation that helps mail servers trust or reject emails.

2. Domain reputation - This looks at how trustworthy your sending domain is, whatever email platform you choose.

These two pieces create your overall sender reputation score. The score runs from 0 to 100, and higher numbers mean better reputation. Scores below 70 show poor performance, 71-80 looks fair, and anything above 80 stands as good. Low scores make your emails end up in spam folders or get blocked completely.

Several factors shape your sender reputation:

• Bounce and unsubscribe rates

• Recipient spam complaints

• Email engagement (opens, clicks, deletions)

• How often and how much you send

• Authentication status (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)

How to check the reputation of an email address?

You need to know your email reputation before you can fix it. These specialized tools will help you understand where your sending practices stand.

Use Sender Score to check IP reputation

Sender Score is a free service by Validity that rates your IP address on a scale from 0 to 100, like a credit score for email. Your score shows how mailbox providers view your sending practices. Just enter your IP address at SenderScore.org to get your rating. The score comes from data collected from over 80 mailbox providers and security networks, and updates every 30 days on average. Higher scores mean better reputation. Scores below 70 usually point to deliverability problems.

Check domain reputation with Talos Intelligence

Talos Intelligence by Cisco has a reputation lookup tool for IPs and domains. Their database gathers security intelligence from millions of web, email, firewall, and IPS appliances. You can check if providers rate your sending infrastructure as Good, Neutral, or Poor by entering your domain or IP at the Talos Reputation Center. Note that [domain reputation] can be different from IP reputation when you use dynamic DNS configurations.

Use Google Postmaster Tools for Gmail insights

Google Postmaster Tools gives great data about your email performance when sending to Gmail users. Once you verify domain ownership, you'll see dashboards with domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rates, and authentication status. Google uses a four-tier scale: Bad, Low, Medium, and High. This tool only shows data for messages sent to personal Gmail accounts with enough volume.

Try Send Forensics for in-depth analysis

Send Forensics offers detailed reputation monitoring that includes blacklist tracking, spam trap detection, and DKIM/SPF/DMARC configuration analysis. Their reputation dashboard combines data from multiple sources to create a central hub for email deliverability metrics. The platform alerts you when it finds issues like blacklistings or authentication problems that could hurt your performance.

Monitor blacklists with MXToolbox and Spamhaus

MXToolbox tests your IP against more than 100 DNS-based blacklists. These blacklists can affect your deliverability by a lot. You should also check Spamhaus, one of the most important blacklist providers. Their listings can stop your emails from reaching inboxes at providers that use their filtering services. Most blacklists let you remove listings, but you must fix the root problems to avoid getting listed again.

Persana.ai combines many of these monitoring features in one platform, making it easier to track and improve your email sender reputation.

Common Reasons for a Low Sender Reputation

Your email sender reputation plays a vital role in keeping good deliverability. Your sender score can take a hit from several factors that often work together and create a downward spiral in performance.

High bounce and unsubscribe rates

Email service providers see bounces as immediate red flags. Hard bounces from permanent delivery failures cause the most damage, and rates above 2% become problematic. These show invalid email addresses and poor list maintenance. Soft bounces from temporary problems like full inboxes will hurt your reputation if they happen too often.

Recipients who find your content irrelevant or too frequent will unsubscribe more. A rate higher than 1.5% points to why there might be problems with your email strategy. ESPs take this as a sign that you might buy lists or send spam emails, which drops your sender score even more.

Spam complaints and spam traps

Your emails get spam complaints when recipients mark them as junk. Just a 0.3% complaint rate can cause filtering issues with big providers like Gmail and Yahoo. Most ESPs start to worry when rates go above 0.05%.

Spam traps pose an equal threat - these email addresses catch bad senders. You'll find three types: pristine traps that were never used for subscription, recycled ones from abandoned addresses, and typo traps made from common domain misspellings. Hitting any of these traps could get you blacklisted right away.

Inconsistent sending patterns

Email providers get suspicious when they see sudden jumps in email volume or irregular sending. Strange patterns might trigger automatic restrictions because they look like spammer behavior. Your legitimacy with ISPs grows stronger when you stick to predictable sending schedules.

Low engagement and open rates

Engagement metrics that look weak tell providers your emails don't matter to recipients. Open rates that fall below 20% usually signal reputation issues. Low engagement that keeps happening pushes future emails into spam folders, and this creates a negative cycle. Sending emails to people who haven't opened them in over 12 months actively hurts your sender's reputation.

How do I fix my email sender reputation?

Fixing your email sender reputation needs a focused plan that targets several important areas. Here's how you can repair your reputation and get your emails delivered better.

Authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

Your first step is to set up proper email authentication protocols that prove you're legitimate to inbox providers. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) shows which IP addresses can send from your domain. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature that proves your emails are untouched. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication) builds on these by telling providers what to do with unauthenticated messages.

Clean your email list regularly

A clean email list plays a vital role in your reputation. You should remove bounced emails and subscribers who haven't shown interest in 6 months or longer.

Persana.ai can automate this process and watch your sender health. Your sender reputation takes 30-60 days to repair, so you'll need some patience.

Use double opt-in to grow your list organically

Double opt-in asks subscribers to confirm their subscription by email. This ensures only interested people join your list. The method cuts spam complaints by 65% and keeps spam traps away from your list. Your list might grow slower, but you'll have quality audiences that engage better.

Avoid spam trigger words in subject lines

Some phrases set off spam filters right away. Stay away from words like "urgent," "free cash," "amazing," "risk free," and too much punctuation or capitalization. Put clear unsubscribe links at the top and bottom of your emails.

Segment your audience for better targeting

Break your email list into smaller groups based on demographics, behavior, or priorities. Segmented campaigns get 65% higher open rates because people receive content they care about. You can group by purchase history, location, and how often they engage.

Test and optimize email content for engagement

Start by sending emails only to subscribers who clicked links in the last two weeks. Then include those who opened emails within 4-6 weeks. You can rebuild your reputation step by step. Keep open rates above 20-25% before you reach out to more people.

Conclusion

Building a strong email sender reputation needs constant work and smart practices. In this piece, we've learned how bad sender reputation affects deliverability. Your emails have nowhere near the chance of reaching inboxes when scores drop below 80.

Note that fixing your reputation takes time - usually 30-60 days of doing things right. You should focus on quality rather than quantity during this time. Send emails only to subscribers who actively participate with your content.

Your first defense against reputation damage comes from email authentication. The right SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup proves you're legitimate to email providers and protects your brand from spoofing.

Your content quality matters as much as technical setup. Messages that are targeted and relevant naturally get more engagement when they avoid spam trigger words. So this positive engagement tells email providers that people want and value your communications.