Protect your Email Sender Reputation

The higher your score, the better your email deliverability, simply because the entire internet looks at your reputation before receiving your email. What can you do about it?

Your email reputation or sender reputation is the score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns to your organization – the higher your score, the better your email deliverability. And if your score falls below the ISP’s threshold, it may reject your emails outright or send them to the recipient's spam folders. Poor email deliverability costs you. When your emails and marketing campaigns are not reaching the intended recipients, you’re wasting resources.

Because your goal is to successfully land in your recipients’ inboxes, you should be actively building and maintaining your email reputation.

Factors Used to Calculate Email Sender Reputation

Every ISP has its own set of factors to calculate email reputation score. However, most ISPs will use the following factors:

• Domain and IP reputation - Age of your IP address and domain. Generally, the older the domain is, the better. However, ISPs will also look into your domain’s activities, such as sender history and whether it’s ever been blacklisted on any websites.
• The number of recipients that report or mark your emails as spam includes how frequently your emails are associated with spam traps.
• Volume and frequency of emails sent – Sending big batches of emails in rapid succession can appear suspicious and perceived as spam behavior.
• Hard and soft bounce rates – This is why it helps to maintain a clean mailing list.
• Email engagement – Open rates, forwards, replies. The ISP will look at how recipients interact with your emails; therefore, deletions, unsubscribes, and low engagement can lead an ISP to filter your emails out.
• Status on blacklists - If you’re experiencing email deliverability issues, you may not realize you’re on an email blacklist. There are free sites that allow you to test a mail server IP address against DNS-based email blacklists.  

How to Increase Your Email Reputation

Fortunately, there are ways to build and maintain your email reputation and improve deliverability. Here are some ways to protect email reputation:

Monitor email reputation regularly – There are third-party tools that can help you track your sending reputation. These tools use different data sources to calculate your sender score, giving you an idea of IP and domain reputation.

Register close-cousin or look-alike domains – Close-cousin or look-alike domains are deceptively similar to yours; there may be slight differences, but at first glance, a reader may mistake it as yours. By registering close-cousin or look-alike domains, you’ll have control of all the websites that threat actors may use to pretend to be you.

Implement email authentication protocols – When threat actors impersonate your domain, they can deliver malicious messages or spam under your domain name, which can ruin your domain and email reputation. Email authentication protocols such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) help you identify, respond, block, or filter illegitimate or unauthorized messages. By ensuring no one is spoofing your domain, you improve your domain reputation, which can also increase your email reputation.

AnubisNetworks helps you stay ahead of these threats with a platform that uses sophisticated mechanisms and technologies, like Anti-fraud, DLP, Anti-spoofing, Sandbox-based Malware Analysis, and AAA analysis such as DMARC, MTA-STS, DKIM, and SPF.