<< Why Should I Care about my Reputation?
The Components of a Good Reputation
Email reputation is not determined by one single thing, it is the sum of many data points gathered over time. While various methods for reputation scoring are used today, the “Report Spam” mechanism has given email receivers the greatest amount of data by which to gauge the sender’s reputation. The same foundation of “User Generated Content” that fuels Web 2.0 sites like MySpace, Flickr, and Digg.com helps email users determine the reputation of the sender prior to opening the message.
Email receivers use four specific components to measure the reputation of the sender. These include number of complaints, number of bounces, number of messages sent, and the size of the messages (see Figure 1).
If your reputation reaches a specific threshold, email receivers will begin to block messages from you. The thresholds are usually based on an algorithm of reputation measurement device per message component over time, and, as such, the reputation might be computed using an algorithm of bounces from a particular sender IP address per hour or complaints from messages containing a certain link per minute (see Figure 2).
It is important to keep in mind that each email receiver has different rules for determining reputation so the threshold for blocking messages will differ amongst them.
Email receivers score reputation on two areas of the email itself – the envelope and the body of the message. The envelope contains the message’s header and the source server’s IP address, host name, From address field, Reply-To address field, etc. The body of the message contains the email text, images, and links to external websites in either plain text or HTML format. Both the envelope and body must warrant the attention of email marketers as each part needs to be transparent to the extent that no traces of the ESP appear in either area.
