A good habit to follow before sending your bulk email is to look up the IP reputation of your SMTP service.
IP reputation is the major contributor to delivery rates, especially if you are sending to the largest ISP’s, e.g. Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail. Statistics show that 83% of the time, sender reputation is the real cause of filtering: by monitoring it you will be able to identify problems affecting your sender reputation, determine the causes, and fix them.
Here are some of the major metrics ISPs look at when managing the message sent into their system:
- volume of emails (illegitimate bulk mail do normally trigger spam filters)
- spamtraps hits (old inboxes that ISPs reactivate specifically to trap spammers )
- invalid address rates (hard bounces)
- complaints rates (how often recipients hit the “report spam” button to response to your message)
The good news is that there are some online services that let you check your IP reputation. We recommend these four Free ones:
