Your Domain's Email Reputation

An asset you did not know you had

Mail providers form a judgement about every sending domain, based on how their users react to messages from it.

That judgement decides whether your message reaches an inbox, lands in a spam folder, or is rejected before delivery.

It applies to your whole domain, which means it affects quotes and invoices as much as newsletters, and a problem caused by marketing shows up in ordinary correspondence.

It builds slowly, over months of unremarkable sending, and it can drop in a single afternoon.

What builds it

• Consistent volume, rather than bursts.
• People opening and replying.
• Very few complaints.
• Almost no bounces.
• Authentication in place and correct.
• Time, which none of the others replaces.

The second matters more than most people realise. A message somebody replies to is the strongest possible signal, which is one reason a small business sending real correspondence starts from a good position.

What destroys it

Faster than any of the above builds it.

A sudden burst to a list that has not been contacted recently, producing bounces and complaints together.

A compromised mailbox sending spam from your domain, which can happen overnight and is the worst version.

Sending to addresses that no longer exist, in volume, which mail providers read as a sign the list was not obtained or maintained properly.

Repeated messages people mark as junk, even in small numbers, since the ratio matters more than the count for a small sender.

And a shared server whose other occupants are doing any of the above, which is somebody else's behaviour affecting your standing.

Volume is judged relative to your normal

The point that catches small businesses specifically.

A domain that normally sends thirty messages a day, suddenly sending six hundred, looks like a compromised account regardless of whether the six hundred are legitimate.

Providers are watching for exactly that pattern, because it is what a hijacked mailbox looks like.

Which means the first newsletter from a domain that has never sent one is the riskiest message you will ever send.

The remedy is to build up: send to a few dozen engaged people, then a few hundred, over weeks rather than in one evening.

That is slower and it is the difference between a list that works and a domain that spends two months in spam folders.

A worked example

A business sent their first newsletter to about five hundred addresses accumulated over four years, from a domain that normally sent a few dozen messages daily.

Around seventy bounced immediately and a handful of people marked it as junk.

Within a week, ordinary business email started landing in spam folders for two large providers, including quotes going to customers who were expecting them.

It took roughly six weeks of normal sending, with no further bulk messages, before delivery returned to normal.

The newsletter had produced two enquiries and had cost them an unknown number of quotes that were never read.

Their conclusion was that the marketing risk had been small and the operational risk had been the real one.

How to check where you stand

Three checks, all free, and none of them requires anything installed.

Google's postmaster tools report domain reputation, spam rate, and authentication results for mail sent to their users, which for most Canadian small businesses is a large share of recipients. It requires verifying your domain and a few days of data.

Public blocklist checkers report whether your domain or your sending address appears on any of the widely used lists, which takes about a minute.

And your mailing tool, if you use one, reports bounces and complaints per send, which is the earliest warning available.

Check the first two once, when nothing is wrong, so you know what normal looks like for you.

If it has already dropped

The recovery, which is mostly patience.

Stop bulk sending entirely, immediately, since continuing makes it worse.

Find and fix the cause: a compromised mailbox, a bad list, or an authentication problem, and check all three rather than assuming.

Then send normal business correspondence as usual, which is the traffic that rebuilds standing, and expect several weeks.

Where you appear on a blocklist, most have a delisting process that is straightforward once the cause is fixed and pointless before.

Do not switch domains to escape it, which carries the problem to a new domain with no history and generally makes things worse.

Protect the mailbox itself

Since the worst version of this is not a marketing mistake.

A compromised mailbox sending spam from your domain damages your standing faster than anything you could do deliberately.

Strong distinct passwords on every mail account, two-step verification where available, and removing accounts belonging to people who have left are the whole defence.

Watch for the signs: replies to messages you did not send, a sent folder with unfamiliar items, or a sudden rise in bounces.

That is a security matter with a deliverability consequence, and it is worth the twenty minutes it takes to secure properly.

The counter-case

Reputation is worth understanding and not worth obsessing over.

A business sending ordinary correspondence to people who know them, with authentication configured, will never have a problem and does not need to check anything monthly.

The published reputation figures are also coarse, delayed, and cover only one provider's view, so reading them closely produces more anxiety than insight.

There is also a version of this where a business becomes so nervous that it stops emailing customers who would welcome hearing from it.

Set up authentication, build volume gradually, keep the list clean, secure the mailboxes, and otherwise get on with it.

What to do

1. Verify your domain in postmaster tools.
2. Check a blocklist once while things are fine.
3. Build volume gradually, never in one evening.
4. Watch bounces on every send.
5. Secure every mailbox with two-step verification.
6. Remove accounts for people who have left.
7. Stop sending immediately if delivery drops.

Step three prevents the most common self-inflicted version, since the first bulk message from a low-volume domain is the riskiest one it will ever send.

The mechanics of a message being filtered are covered in why your email goes to spam.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.