How to Check Email Address Reputation (and Why Do You Need to Do That)

Email deliverability in cold outreach is an uphill battle. This is why businesses are ready to spend thousands of dollars on email validation, content optimization, list testing, and other tools in their deliverability stack. 

Yet, even the top-quality list and trigger-free email copy don’t guarantee that your messages will actually reach the inbox. The most important element of email deliverability that often goes overlooked is your email server reputation.

In this post, we will talk about what it means and how to check email address reputation (and improve it).

Email server reputation: what does it mean and how to check it

Simply put, your email server reputation is the overall trustworthiness of the email service you are using. It is a combination of your domain reputation, IP reputation, and other factors that determine how safe your email campaigns are and whether they deserve to be delivered to the recipient’s inbox at all. 

As you send and receive emails, your email domain will build a track record of past messages. A spam filter uses this history to determine if your message should be considered spam or not.

The main factors affecting your sender reputation are the number of spam complaints that were made against your emails, unsubscribe requests, and outgoing email volume.

When an email gets flagged for spam, it can be difficult to get your privileges restored and maximize your delivery rate. This is where the procedure of email reputation check comes into play. Using dedicated domain reputation tools to check your current sender score, you can see if it’s safe to send your emails – and fix any existing issues in advance. 

Some of the most common tools that can help with the email reputation test are:

• MailTester
• SenderScore.org
• MxToolbox

To conduct the mail server reputation test using these tools you will be required to send an email to the dedicated address. They will analyze it against a wide array of parameters. SMTP reputation check is also part of the procedure.

Taking action to fix your email reputation

As you can see, the email reputation test should be a vital part of your deliverability audit. But what do you do if your reputation has been compromised?

Email warm-up tactics can save the day! Simply put, you can send emails to the trusted inboxes and have people engage with them – open, mark them as important, and respond to them. 

This can be done manually or using automated tools that closely imitate human behavior. As a result, you will make email service providers believe that your domain is safe and can be trusted, thus gradually improving your reputation as a sender.