How to Understand the Reputation of SMTP Server to Send emails

How to Understand the Reputation of SMTP Server to Send emails, because the ability to receive an email or newsletters by users is dependent on the reputation. Previously we wrote about few things, which are quite important to know before dipping deeper inside the core of this article – How to Understand the Reputation of SMTP Server. If you already know these things, that is well and good, else read them first.

How to Understand the Reputation of SMTP Server : The Basic Points you Need to Know

These following points are important for proper understanding of this article on how to Understand the Reputation of SMTP Server, which we basically pointed towards in the previous paragraph :

• Mail Server, POP3, IMAP and SMTP
• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• Dynamic DNS or DDNS
• Whitelist and Whitelisting

How to Understand the Reputation of SMTP Server to Send emails

Back to the point. In previous articles we have seen, how the ability to get an email from the sender or newsletters from the sender directly in the INBOX, not SPAM folder of the user is dependent on the quality of the content of the message and also the reputation it has gained in the field SMTP server.

The reputation is linked to a specific IP address and is calculated on the basis of various factors and different algorithms, but those that primarily affect are:

• The volume of emails sent  over time
• The number of emails marked as spam by end users
• The number of emails sent to nonexistent users
• The number of emails sent to Spam folder

Returning to the measurement of the reputation of SMTP server, usually this parameter is supplied by companies that are able to intercept and monitor large number of email traffic,the anti-spam gateway manufacturers or companies that make trade agreements with large ESP such as Yahoo or Hotmail. The company that perhaps most of all can give us a value of global reputation is on the Return-Path.

Using the parameter Return-Path Score evaluates and ranks the email traffic that passes. The value of their Sender Score is immediately noticeable from the website like senderscore.org by simply entering the IP address of the server, from which emails will go out. Sender Score gives us a number between 0 and 100, and a graph that shows the volume of emails sent from that IP address.

By registering you can get more details and know for example, if in our listings are email addresses Spam Trap. But what interests us is the numerical value of Sender Score. The best result is the value of 100 but normally a value not less than 95 will give a good reputation. Value below 90 indicates that our reputation has problems, values between 70 and 80 indicative of spam.

Another important benchmark to measure the reputation of its IP addresses is SenderBase by Cisco. Here the data are collected based on the email traffic that passes through an antispam gateway installed at many companies server. Compared to the previous, it takes a greater email traffic in terms of volume and easily alarmed if there are sudden spikes in traffic, in many cases these are symptoms of an abuse of the server.

It is about How to Understand the Reputation of SMTP Server to Send emails, not how to make it better, that will be a separate article itself.