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Domain Reputation Issues

Inbox Providers monitor the reputation of email-sending domains with their users. How can an email recover its domain's reputation with an Inbox Provider?

Google, Yahoo!, and Outlook.com have internal mechanisms to monitor their users' sentiment about an email domain based upon user behavior.  

  • Is email from this domain frequently marked as spam?
  • Does this newsletter get deleted and go unread?
  • Does this email resemble email that's frequently marked as spam?

Over time, this can mean that ALL email from a domain is automatically classified as spam or junk by the Inbox Provider. In the short-term, that means legitimate customers still receive the email but in another folder. In the long-term, this can mean email being completely denied at the Inbox Provider.

How do you detect a potential Domain Reputation Issue?

Send a blank text-only email to MxToolbox's Inbox Placement addresses from your standard email marketing system. Do NOT include a header, footer, signature, or body markup (no HTML or CSS). 

If this email fails an Inbox, you might have a Domain Reputation Issue. If this email is accepted at all Inbox Providers, then you might have a Content Reputation Issue.

How do you repair a Domain Reputation Issue?

Google, Yahoo!, and Outlook typically use a rolling spam rate to determine if a domain has a poor reputation. This is good news. You might be able to repair your domain reputation. Here are few things that can help:

  • Purge old email addresses from your sending lists. These are probably a source of emails "Marked as Spam".
  • Stop using cold or purchased email lists. These are more likely to be marked as spam.
  • Set up separate email subdomains for Marketing emails, Transactional emails, and 1-to-1 communications. 
  • Halt email marketing programs temporarily.

Over time, this will increase the ratio of accepted email to that marked as spam and you should see more of your email making the Inbox. If not, you'll need to rebuild your sending domain.

Rebuilding a Sending Domain

In extreme cases, we've seen that an email sending domain has such a poor reputation with Google, Yahoo!, or Outlook.com that it's effectively blacklisted at the provider. In these cases, no email gets through to the Inbox and in many cases, no email is delivered to even the Junk or Spam folder.  

Rebuilding a sending domain takes time. You must set up an entirely new email set of sending domains, set up MX records, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. This time around, you should use separate domains for Marketing, Transactional, and 1-to-1 communications. Plus, you must change your email sending practices! Inbox Providers will easily determine that they're receiving email similar to that marked as spam from a new domain and will quickly shut it down.

Leverage MxToolbox Tools

Setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC can be difficult. MxToolbox has free tools, paid DMARC solutions, and a Managed Services offering to help you rebuild your email sending reputation.