5 tools to check your sending reputation

While there is no singular score that all mailbox providers use to evaluate your sending, there are some third-party tools that can help you monitor your sending reputation. All of these tools are based on different data sources and attempt to score senders based on their practices and results.  Individually, these scores don’t often tell the entire story, but when used in conjunction with other data points, can be very helpful in identifying reputation issues.

1. SenderScore.org

Like a credit score, a Sender Score is a measure of your reputation. Scores are calculated from 0 to 100. The higher your score, the better your reputation and the higher your email deliverability rate. Numbers are calculated on a rolling 30-day average and illustrate where your IP address ranks against other IP addresses. This service is provided by Validity.

2. BarracudaCentral

Barracuda Networks provides both an IP and domain reputation lookup via their Barracuda Reputation System; a real-time database of IP addresses with “poor” or “good” reputations.

3. TrustedSource

TrustedSource is run by McAfee. It provides information on both your domain’s email and web reputations as well as affiliations, domain name system (DNS) and mail server information. It also provides details on the history, activation and associations of your domain.

4. Google Postmaster Tools 

Google offers their Postmaster Tools to senders allowing you to track data on your high volume sending into Gmail. The helpful data they provide includes IP reputation, domain reputation, Gmail delivery errors and more.

5. Microsoft SNDS

Similar to Google’s Postmaster Tools, Microsoft offers a service called Smart Network Data Services (SDNS). Among the data provided by SNDS is insight into data points like your sending IP’s reputation, how many Microsoft spam traps you are delivering to and your spam complaint rate. 

For more information on SNDS, see our dedicated article

Not every mailbox provider gives you insight into how they view your sending reputation, but two of the largest mailbox providers do. Through Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS, you can freely see a day-by-day evaluation of the reputation of the messages these major providers see from you. While Google’s and Microsoft’s view of your sending reputation has no impact on how other providers see your mail, it’s a good bet that troubles at these major providers will be accompanied by similar troubles elsewhere.

As an e-shot customer, we monitor all this for you and provide easy to use tools to help you manage your deliverability, including a deliverability dashboard and a dedicated team that are constantly monitoring the deliverability landscape. Other tools at your disposal include our email forensics.