Sender Reputation by Sending Domain
Your sender reputation is scored for each sending domain you use, not for your account as a whole. If you send from more than one domain, each one earns its own standing, and a problem on one does not drag down the others.
What we'll cover
- What sender reputation measures
- Why it's scored per domain
- What moves the score
- Reading the score
- The Sender reputation by domain report
- New domains and domains that rarely send
- How to improve a domain's score
- Common questions
- Related articles
1 What sender reputation measures
Sender reputation is our estimate of how mailbox providers are likely to treat mail from a given sending domain, based on how that mail has actually performed.
It is not a mailbox provider's own score. Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo each keep their own view of you and none of them publish it. What we can see is the evidence they act on: whether your mail is being accepted, bounced, blocked, or reported as spam. The score is our reading of that evidence, expressed as a number from 0 to 100.
The practical value is that it moves before your delivery does. By the time mail is visibly landing in spam, the damage is weeks old. The score turns that into something you can watch and act on.
2 Why it's scored per domain
Mailbox providers judge a sending identity, not a company. The domain in your From address, and the domain that signs your mail with DKIM, is the thing they build a history about.
That matters most if you send from more than one domain:
- An agency sending on behalf of several clients, one domain per client
- A business separating marketing from transactional or product email
- Anyone who has moved to a new domain and is building it up
Scoring per domain means a single bad list on one domain affects that domain. Your other domains keep the standing they earned. Under an account-wide score, one client's mistake would have pulled down every client you send for.
3 What moves the score
The score is built from what happened to mail that domain actually sent. The inputs are:
| Signal | What it means |
|---|---|
| Spam complaints | Recipients marking your mail as spam. The strongest negative signal there is, because it is the recipient telling the provider directly. |
| Hard bounces | Mail to addresses that do not exist. A high rate says your list is stale or was not collected properly. |
| Soft bounces | Temporary failures such as a full mailbox. Individually normal; a pattern is not. |
| Authentication failures | Mail rejected because SPF, DKIM or DMARC did not line up. Usually a configuration problem, and always worth fixing immediately. |
| Content blocks | A provider refused the message based on what was in it, often a link or an attachment. |
| Sender blocks | A provider refused the message based on who sent it. The most serious of the block types. |
Two things about how they combine are worth knowing.
They are weighted, not counted. A spam complaint costs considerably more than a soft bounce, because that is how mailbox providers treat them. Ten soft bounces are not equivalent to ten complaints.
They are weighted by volume. A campaign sent to 80,000 people moves the score more than one sent to 200. This stops a small test send from dominating the picture in either direction.
Engagement, meaning opens and clicks, is tracked and reported separately. It tells you whether people want your mail, which is a different question from whether it is being delivered.
4 Reading the score
| Range | What it means |
|---|---|
| 75–100 | Healthy. Nothing to do. |
| 50–74 | Needs attention. Something in your sending or your list needs to change, and it is usually one identifiable campaign. |
| Below 50 | At risk. Delivery problems are likely already happening. |
These are the same three bands the colour coding uses everywhere you see a score, so a green figure in your Domains list and a green figure in the report mean the same thing.
The score is a rolling view of recent sending, so it recovers as new, cleaner sends replace older ones. It is not a permanent record, and one bad campaign does not mark a domain for good.
Note: Campaigns are scored about two days after they send. Bounces and complaints keep arriving for a day or two, so scoring immediately would produce a number that changed under you. A campaign you sent this morning appears in the report without a score until then.
5 The Sender reputation by domain report
Go to Reports → Account → Sender reputation by domain to see what moved a domain's score and when.
- Current score and the period's high and low, with the dates they occurred
- Score over time, plotted only on days that domain actually sent
- What the domain sent, split between campaigns and transactional, so you can see which side of your sending the score reflects
- Campaigns sent from this domain, each with its own score and share of the period's volume
Click any campaign to open its full report, where the delivery detail behind its score lives.
If some of your campaigns use a merge tag in the From address, they resolve to a different sender per recipient and cannot be attributed to one domain. Those are listed separately at the bottom of the table and are excluded from the domain's score rather than guessed at.
6 New domains and domains that rarely send
A domain with no sending history has nothing to score. Rather than show you a meaningless zero, a new domain starts from your account's overall standing and earns its own score as it sends.
This is also why a domain that sends rarely shows a score based on a small amount of evidence. The report shows how many days that domain actually sent in the period, so you can weigh it accordingly.
New domains also send at a reduced volume at first, increasing as they establish themselves. This is normal for any new sending identity and is not a restriction placed on your account.
7 How to improve a domain's score
In rough order of how much difference they make:
- Stop mailing people who do not want it. Complaints are the heaviest signal by a wide margin. Honour unsubscribes immediately, and stop mailing contacts who have not engaged in a long time.
- Clean the list. Hard bounces are the second heaviest and the easiest to fix. Remove addresses that have already bounced, and never mail a purchased or scraped list.
- Fix authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC failures are a configuration problem with a definite fix.
- Send consistently. A domain that sends steadily is easier for a provider to trust than one that is silent for a month and then sends 200,000.
- Segment. Sending your most engaged contacts first tends to lift how the rest of the send is treated.
8 Common questions
Is this the same score Gmail uses?
No. Providers do not publish their scores. This is our reading of the same evidence they act on, which is why it usually moves in the same direction as your delivery.
One domain scores badly. Are my other domains affected?
Not directly. Each domain carries its own score. If a large share of your total sending comes from a domain that is struggling, that can become an account-level concern, but a healthy domain is not penalised for an unhealthy sibling.
My score dropped and I did not change anything.
The most common cause is a campaign to a segment that had not been mailed in a long time. Re-engagement sends attract complaints and bounces at a much higher rate. The report will show you which campaign it was.
How do I raise it quickly?
You cannot, and that is deliberate. The score reflects a rolling window of real sending, so it recovers at the pace of your actual sends. Sending more to recover faster is the one thing that reliably makes it worse.
Does transactional email count?
Yes. It is mail from the same domain, and providers treat it as such. It usually helps: transactional mail is expected by the recipient and tends to perform well.
If I delete a domain and add it back, does the score reset?
No. Reputation history follows the domain name, so a domain you remove and re-add resumes the standing it had.