About Sender Score

Each email provider uses your Sender Score to filter emails in different ways. Here’s how it works.

Sender Scores range from 0 to 100. Any sender score below 100 means your sender reputation can be improved. Pushing your Sender Score to 100, however, isn’t necessarily the best way to optimize your email program results. You should use your Sender Score along with email filter diagnostics to help guide your email strategy to a place that makes your email subscribers happy and engaged.

Email senders with a Sender Score below 70 typically experience aggressive email filtering applied to every email coming from the IP address attached to the Sender Score. Email senders maintaining a Sender Score above 70 typically see filtering criteria applied to individual emails and email campaigns instead of entire IP addresses.

Senders with high Sender Scores are still vulnerable to high levels of email filtering. In addition to monitoring your Sender Score and the related reputation metrics, you should continually monitor all filtering criteria used by the email providers to see how changes in your IP reputation are impacting the level of filtering being applied to your emails.

If you have a score of 70 or above, you should still pay attention to two key things.

• Each email provider uses your Sender Score to filter emails in different ways. For example, a Sender Score of 90 may result in less stringent filtering at one email provider while having no positive impact on filtering at another email provider.
• Additional filtering criteria applies to every email campaign. No matter how high or how low your Sender Score is, you should regularly monitor reputation metrics and all other filtering criteria using email filter diagnostics to analyze results at each email provider for each campaign. That way, you can fix and prevent problems holistically before they impact your next email campaign and your future revenue streams.

Email filter troubleshooting tools provide filter diagnostics and visibility into filtering criteria at email providers. The best tools combine email seed data, consumer email data, reputation network data, and specific filtering criteria at a variety of major email providers to diagnose filtering and sender compliance issues holistically across your email program. Contact Return Path for more information about email filter troubleshooting tools and services to help you optimize your email deliverability and revenue.

Information for Email Providers and Network Operators

Sender Score data from Return Path is one of the ways we make the email ecosystem better for everyone. Sender Score can help you identify outbound email abuse from your network and limit the amount of email entering your network with low reputation metrics. Sender Score reputation data helps you to make better decisions to mitigate inbound spam into your network and deliver rapid response to any outbound mail abuse coming from your IP addresses. Contact Return Path’s email provider team for more information about using reputation and abuse network data to create a better customer experience at a lower cost.

Ready to be part of the industry's most respected whitelist?

Earn preferred inbox placement for your emails from email providers and filters including Yahoo!, Outlook.com Time Warner Cable, Spam Assassin and many more. Learn more about Return Path’s Certification program.