Sender reputation: what it means

Sender reputation is the trust mailbox providers place in mail from you. Each provider keeps its own view, built from the history of your sending domain and the IP addresses you send from. When reputation is good, your emails are accepted and mostly placed in the inbox or Promotions tab. When it is poor, they are filtered to spam, slowed down or rejected.

Reputation is built from signals over time. Positive ones include consistent authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, steady volume, low bounce rates and recipients who open, click and reply. Negative ones include spam complaints, hits on spam traps, high bounce rates, sudden spikes in volume, and recipients who delete without reading. Complaints and spam traps weigh especially heavily.

Domain reputation has become more important than IP reputation, partly because many senders share IPs and partly because domains are harder to swap than IPs. That means a bad campaign can follow you even if you change platforms. Using subdomains for different streams, such as news.yourbrand.com for marketing and your main domain for transactional mail, gives some separation, though providers still link them to the parent domain.

Recovering a damaged reputation is slow but possible. Stop sending to anyone who hasn’t engaged recently, fix authentication, remove complainers and bounces, and send only to your most active contacts for a few weeks, increasing volume gradually as placement improves. There is no quick reset; reputation recovers as providers see weeks of good behaviour.