When it comes to email marketing, a check your domain’s reputation can make or break your ability to reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Domain reputation is the opinion that mailbox providers (including anti-spam services) have about your sender behavior and what kinds of emails you’re sending. It’s kind of like the reputation you build with each person you interact with, based on how you’ve interacted with them in the past or who you’re associated with.
Thankfully, it’s not very hard to check your domain’s reputation. However, it’s important to understand what you’re measuring when looking at your domain reputation score. Most receivers keep their reputation scoring algorithms top secret, to prevent scammers and other nefarious senders from reverse-engineering the system to their advantage.
Domain Reputation Checker: Best Tools to Use
There are many tools available to help you check your domain’s reputation, such as MXToolbox and Spamhaus. Both of these offer an ip reputation lookup, based on databases that are monitored and updated regularly. However, they are not comprehensive and may only focus on specific receivers. For example, MXToolbox and Spamhaus are both owned by email service providers, so their reputation information might be a bit biased.
A more comprehensive tool is Talos Intelligence, which provides a domain reputation lookup that uses a variety of data sources to give you a true picture of your sender reputation across the board. Talos Intelligence is owned by Cisco, which provides much of the backbone infrastructure for the internet, so their domain reputation information is very reliable.