Email reputation service

With reputation services in place, you don’t have to spend time worrying about your email return path or wondering if your company’s emails ended up in a spam folder.
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Increase email deliverability by improving your reputation

In today’s digital landscape, email is still the go-to channel — powering marketing campaigns, team collaboration, and sales outreach alike. Yet even the most compelling email can fall flat if your sender reputation isn’t solid. With our email reputation service, you get proactive insights and safeguards to maintain a healthy sending profile, ensuring your messages land where they belong: the inbox.

“Email reputation” or sender reputation is an important factor mailbox providers (mail servers) such as Google’s Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or Yahoo Mail, use to score the credibility of your organization as an email sender. Each mailbox provider has its own complex algorithm that tracks and updates your sender reputation, which is based on both your domain and your IP address (IP). Email reputation services exist to help you track and optimize your email reputation to optimize email deliverability.

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Using email logs to track history

Want real-time updates on email deliverability? Worried that you may have hit a spam trap? The best email reputation services log and index every action taken on your message, allowing you to understand exactly what happened. Logs can be retained for up to 30 days, giving you the ability to troubleshoot and trend the details of your email sends.

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Optimize your IP reputation

Your ideal IP approach depends on how you run your email programs and how many messages you send each day — and an email reputation service can guide you through the decision. It tracks key reputation metrics, flags issues, and recommends the best IP configuration. As a rule of thumb, businesses sending more than 50,000 emails daily usually benefit from a dedicated IP, whereas those under 5,000 daily might find a shared IP (with other senders) offers better protection for their reputation.

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Optimize your domain reputation

Your business could have an email program for corporate emails, marketing emails, sales emails, and customer emails. One way to improve your sender score and protect your domain reputation and email reputation is to use a different top-level domain and email address for each email program. By using reputation services, an administrator can easily create and manage multiple domains or subdomains very easily and use each one for a different email program.

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Build a better reputation

With Mailgun’s email reputation service and managed services, you get a unified dashboard for tracking logs plus a dedicated email expert who watches over your sender reputation day in and day out. Reach out now to discover how our team can help boost your deliverability and keep your emails landing in the inbox.

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How is your email reputation determined?

Building a positive email reputation is not an exact science. And like most things, it doesn’t happen overnight. When we talk about reputation, we are referring to the combination of two things: IP reputation and domain reputation. While there is some overlap between the two concepts, there are some key distinctions.

To start, an IP address pinpoints the computer or mail server sending your emails and connecting you online; because it’s unique, it directly ties back to your sending behavior. Meanwhile, your domain name appears in the “@” of your email address and carries its own reputation. With an email reputation service, you gain visibility into how both your IPs and domains are perceived by inbox providers, helping you catch and resolve reputation issues before they affect deliverability.

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Why a high sender score matters

Ideally, well-maintained IPs and domains that send only legitimate messages yield a strong sender score. But things don’t always go as planned: if an IP or domain is hijacked or starts sending unwanted emails or viruses, recipients might mark messages as spam or block your address. Left unchecked, this could land you on an IP blocklist and harm deliverability. With an email reputation service, you gain round-the-clock monitoring and proactive alerts, helping you catch anomalies quickly and avoid reputation crises.

Your sender reputation is much like a credit score: when it’s high, inbox providers welcome your messages, and you connect with more customers; when it’s low — due to repeated spam complaints on an IP or domain — your emails get filtered out or even blocked entirely. By using an email reputation service, you get proactive insights and alerts so you can sustain that “creditworthy” status and keep your messages landing where they belong.

And like a credit score, a strong online reputation and a strong sender score takes a while to build. Just as you wouldn’t go out and open dozens of credit card accounts in one day, you don’t want to start by sending extreme amounts of email on day 1. If an email address has no established reputation, it simply means it hasn’t yet appeared on any trusted sources online. In contrast, reputable email addresses have a proven track record and a consistent history of being recognized by multiple trustworthy sites across the web.

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How domain reputation works

Domain reputation hinges on things like how long your web domain has existed, the industry or category it falls into (for instance, e-commerce vs. entertainment), and the quality of connections or links between your site and others. Providers such as Gmail evaluate these elements to judge if your email should land in the inbox. With an email reputation service, you gain visibility into these domain-level factors — seeing how age, category, and link profiles influence deliverability — and receive guidance or alerts when adjustments are needed to preserve a strong reputation.

1. When you use an email server or email service provider, you add DNS records for your domain so every email you send comes from your email address.

2. The recipient’s internet service provider, email program, or email client check your sender reputation before accepting delivery.

3. Your domain’s reputation influences whether your emails land in spam folders or inboxes.

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Key factors for email deliverability

Your domain reputation is just one part of the equation. When it comes to email delivery, other factors also come into play:

  • Email content
  • Web reputation scores by third-party services
  • IP reputations
  • Percentage of malicious code, threat activity, or spyware-containing emails reported from your domain name
  • Spam complaints (any amount is enough to damage your reputation, so be very vigilant and considerate of your reader’s time!)
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From data points to action plans

Building a solid reputation score doesn’t happen overnight, which is all the more reason to check your sender score reports periodically and correct course when you notice any dips. If you’re using an email service provider to handle your email messages, you’re already a step ahead: Mailgun’s Managed Services, for instance, will proactively monitor your web reputation and offer concrete tactics to protect or improve your good reputation. Sometimes that’s a one-and-done solution, like adjusting the send infrastructure. And sometimes it’s an ongoing fix, like tweaking your email campaigns’ subject lines and maintaining your email list to avoid common spam traps. Those small changes can make a big impact.

FAQs

Regular list cleaning is vital to prevent bounces and protect the sender reputation. Typically, you should scrub lists at least every 3–6 months — more frequently for high-volume or low-engagement audiences — and trigger immediate checks when open or click rates drop significantly (e.g., open rates below 25% or CTR under 5%). An email reputation service can automate monitoring of bounce rates and engagement signals, prompting list-cleaning actions as needed.

DMARC enforcement blocks unauthorized senders and protects domain trust. An email reputation monitor can track DMARC pass/fail rates, surface misconfigurations in SPF/DKIM alignment, and alert you when enforcement isn’t applied correctly. By integrating DMARC reporting into reputation monitoring, you ensure only legitimate traffic builds your domain’s reputation. 

Segmentation tailors content to interested recipients, lowering complaint rates. An email reputation service can analyze engagement patterns and flag segments with high complaint or low open rates; it then recommends refining or excluding those groups to maintain healthy sending behavior. This proactive monitoring ensures your segmentation strategy aligns with reputation goals. 

Many reputation-monitoring platforms expose APIs for blacklist checks, deliverability analytics, and alerting. For example, services like MailMonitor offer developer APIs to incorporate reputation checks into deployment or reporting workflows. Integrating an email reputation monitor API into your email workflow enables automated checks before and after campaigns, surfacing issues early. 

ISPs increasingly factor opens, clicks, and overall engagement into reputation evaluations. An email reputation service that tracks engagement metrics alongside complaint and bounce data helps you understand how recipient interactions influence deliverability. By correlating engagement signals with inbox placement trends, the service guides content and cadence adjustments to boost long-term reputation. 

Sudden spikes in volume, unexpected sending times, or a surge in spam complaints often indicate compromised credentials. An email reputation monitor continuously observes sending patterns and complaint rates; when anomalies arise, it issues alerts so you can investigate security incidents promptly. Incorporating these alerts into your incident response helps limit reputation damage from unauthorized sends. 

While exact “scores” vary, you can benchmark indirectly by comparing your bounce rates, complaint rates, engagement metrics, and inbox placement percentages to published industry averages (e.g., Mailchimp’s or other ESPs’ benchmark reports). An email reputation service often provides dashboards that surface these metrics over time; by aligning them with industry norms, you set realistic improvement targets and validate whether your reputation efforts are effective. 

OTHER FEATURES

Explore beyond email reputation

Mailgun has a variety of features for companies in need of email reputation services.

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