Check Sender Reputation with 7 Tools

Traditional email marketing metrics such as bounce rate, click-through rate, open rate, and engagement rate are important for evaluating email marketing success, but there is another factor that is mostly overlooked but has a huge impact on email deliverability and email campaign success.

What is that? That is email sender reputation. 

A good email sender reputation is necessary for the success of email campaigns. A good sender reputation increases the likelihood that your Email Service Provider (ESP) will land your email in the recipient’s primary inbox instead of the spam or junk folder. 

Before outlining the tools to check sender reputation, it is important to understand factors affecting the sender reputation score.

Therefore, this article briefly explains factors affecting sender reputation and then discusses the top 7 tools to check sender reputation. 

Factors affecting email sender reputation

Two main factors influence sender reputation: IP reputation and domain reputation. What are these? Let’s explain them briefly. 

IP Reputation

Every device that is connected to the internet has an IP address—whether it is your computer or a server you used to send email in bulk.

You must have seen numbers such as 212.43.1.445. This is your IP address.

Every email that you send has an IP address in its header that is invisible to the reader, but your ESP, such as Google and Yahoo, can monitor it to analyze your data and sending habits.

Your ESP uses this analysis to rate your IP address, and it is called IP reputation. This IP address reputation score is high for legit senders while the low for spammers. 

One can use both shared and dedicated IP addresses. If you are using a shared IP address, your reputation score is the result of sending habits of all the users using the same IP Address.

You don’t have control over it. However, if you are using a dedicated IP address, then your reputation score is the result of your email sending habits.

It is highly recommended for big businesses to use dedicated IP addresses to have more control over their email reputation. 

Domain reputation

In addition to IP addresses, every email is also associated with a domain name. For example, you are sending an email with the email id [email protected]. Here, xyz.com is your domain name.

In addition to the IP address, your ESP also rates your domain reputation and assigns a score known as domain reputation.

In contrast to IP reputation, your domain reputation is attached to your domain and is calculated based on your past email sending reputation.

Therefore, it is difficult to reset your domain reputation.

Generally, there are three types of domains that affect domain reputation while sending emails. These three domains are From Address, Return-Path domain, and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing domain.

To ensure a good domain reputation, it is imperative to control all these factors meticulously. 

So far, it has become evident that IP reputation and domain reputation that results in sender reputation plays an important role in email deliverability.

Therefore, it is important to keep checking these reputations to ensure a good sender reputation. 

Here are the top 7 tools to check your sender reputation. 

Top 7 Tools to Check Your Sending Reputation

Following are the top 7 tools to check your email sending reputation.

• Pribox.io

• Google Postmaster Tools 

• Talos

• MailTester

• Mxtoolbox

• Ipvoid 

• SendForensics

Now, let’s go through these 7 tools so that you can use one of them to check email sender reputation. 

Pribox.io

Pribox helps you check your sender reputation for free. It also optimizes your sender reputation, warms up your domain and avoids your mail from being stuck in spam.

Pribox activity creates a positive impact on your email, domain, and IP reputation. It's dedicated team of email specialists help you manage your brand reputation and optimize your inbox placement.

Google Postmaster Tools

Google has a lot of data about emails you send. It knows which of your emails were delivered and which were not.

Further, it also knows which of your emails were reported as spam and which emails had a huge engagement. It is a credible tool for spam tests and email deliverability tests.

Google shares this information with the users with a tool called Google Postmaster. They share information about your IP address reputation, domain reputation, and Gmail delivery issues.

It also tells you about email encryption, spam reports, and credibility.

Hence, Google Postmaster is a free tool to analyze your email performance. It evaluates your sender reputation on a 4-step scale. 

Talos

Talos Intelligence is an email reputation checker service provider provided by the Cisco group. It is a very simple and easy-to-use tool to check email reputation, perform email deliverability tests, and check domain reputation.

You can do an IP blacklist check and find IP addresses reputation and domain reputation by simply entering the IP address and domain name in the designated space.

It tells you whether your email service provider is rating your domain or IP as good, neutral, or poor. Good means you are doing well.

Poor rating shows that although there are no fatal issues; however, there is room for improvement.

Lastly, neutral means there is not a sufficient amount of information available about your IP address or domain.   

MailTester 

After sending emails for email marketing campaigns, an email deliverability test is recommended to check email performance.

MailTester is an important tool for examining mail servers, sender IP addresses, and sender domains. Further, you can also check the spamminess of your email.

This toll has both the free and paid version. With the free version, your results will be available for seven days; however, your results will be available for 30 days if you use the paid version.

The best thing about this tool is that you don’t have to create an account if you want to use its free version.

You just go to their website and check your score by entering your IP or domain address.  

Mxtoolbox

This is a very useful tool for email marketers. It allows users to perform email deliverability tests in real-time.

It also allows you to do email reputation checks, IP blacklist checks, check domain reputation and many more tasks.

It has both paid and free versions. With the free version, it provides you with limited services; however, with the paid version, you can perform multiple analyses.

With paid edition, it allows you to check IP, test mail server SMTP, check TXT record, perform a standard ICMP ping, perform a standard ICMP traceroute, and others.

Hence, it is a user-friendly tool for understanding how email service providers look at your email domain.  

Ipvoid 

Ipvoid is another important and easy-to-use tool to check domain reputation. You can also use it for email reputation checks.

It uses databases such as OpenPhish, PhishTank, ThreatLog, and others for IP black list checks and other email performance analyses. This app will let you know whether your email domain is categorized as malicious or not.

It is very simple and easy to use. You can simply insert your domain name and press the “Check Domain” option to analyze your email domain.  

SendForensics

SendForensics is one of the most credible and reliable tools to perform email deliverability tests and find out your sender reputation.

The result of this tool allows you to know how your email provider perceives your email domain and IP address. To analyze your email domain and IP address, write an email and send it to your account.

After that, it briefly analyzes its various components, such as email deliverability, IP addresses, IP blacklist check, email reputation, domain reputation and others, and assigns separate scores for each.

Further, it also gives you recommendations to improve them. 

It is a dream of every email marketer to land their emails in the primary inbox of the recipient. The probability of email landing in the primary inbox increases if you have a good sender reputation.

To have a good email sender reputation score, you need to keep checking your domain reputation and IP address reputation score so that you can improve them if any problems are harming your sender reputation score.

You can use any of the above-mentioned tools to check your sending reputation.