We’ll go over some of the best ways to check your IP reputation in this concise tutorial. If you’ve ever considered sending bulk emails, you sure have come across domain and IP reputations. This tutorial will help you check the IP reputation for the server that you’ll be using to send out your bulk email campaigns.
Domain and IP reputation are two sides of the same coin. But both of them together make up your sending reputation as a whole. We recently wrote a post on taking care of your domain reputation, go ahead and check it out if that’s what you’re looking for.
- Good domain reputation, with a bad server IP reputation, can get your emails into spam.
- Good IP reputation with a bad domain reputation will get your emails to reach spam, or worse, get you blacklisted.
Here is a tool that will help you know if your domain is Blacklisted- Email Blacklist Tool
It might sound like a big deal, but it really isn’t. The Netcore and Pepipost team combined have been sending billions of emails every month of over 20 years now. Delivering them straight to Inbox.
And we’ve been successfully doing so because of some fundamental practices that we follow and assist our customers with improving their domain and IP reputation.
But before we can improve your IP reputation, we need to check your IP reputation. This tutorial will cover some of the best ways which are considered to be industry standards in confirming your IP reputation.
Tools to check your IP reputation
Without wasting time, let’s dive right into this. You need tools to track the IP reputations for you, and so let’s find out some of the best tools to check your IP reputation today.
1. Google Postmaster Domain and IP Reputation Dashboard
This is one of the most accurate data providers since Google owns and controls a lot of data. If you send bulk emails, Google knows about your domain and IP and monitors it regularly to know about your reputation and your sending habits.
And since they also display the data for your domain and IP once you’ve verified it, you have a really solid IP reputation tracker.
How do you track IP reputation with Google Postmaster?
Once you log into Google Postmaster, add your domain to it. If this is the first time you’re logging into Google Postmaster, you’ll be greeted with a prompt asking you to complete the 3 steps to add your first domain. Verify your domain with DNS records and then check the Domain & IP reputation dashboard.
2. Mail Tester
Yet another good IP reputation checker is mail-tester.com. It’s easy to use, quick, and also very easy to understand. Here, you don’t need to find your IP to check the reputation. Simply send out an email to the email address that the website generates for you and your IP reputation will be visible right away
They provide a score out of 10 for your domain and if your domain score is anything less than 10/10, you will receive suggestions on improving the scores. Though a domain reputation of 7 to 9 is good, don’t forget to take into account their suggestions for improving your IP reputation.
3. Cisco Talos Intelligence IP and Domain Reputation Checker
This IP reputation checker is one of the good ones out there in terms of reliability because Cisco is one of the oldest companies in the networking business.
This will show you a graph based on your email sending habits. Depending on how many emails you’ve been sending over a period of time, the graph may show spikes in data letting you know that you need to become more consistent.
We have an excellent article on how to warm up your IP and maintain consistent email flows so your reputation is maintained.
4. SenderScore
SenderScore is one of the niche players in this industry. The company exists solely to provide analytics and information about Domains and IPs that send out emails.
They collect aggregate data from ISPs related to spam complaints and assigns a score to the sender.
- Their scoring algorithm includes:
Complaints – The number of complaints coming for a specific IP compared to the other IPs on the recorded traffic
Volumes – What percentage of the volume is marked as spam
External reputation – This metric is based on a variety of internal and external data on the SenderScore reputation network
Unknown users – What percentage of the emails sent are delivered to emails that don’t exist
Rejected emails – What percentage of emails are rejected compared to the other IP addresses.
5. Cyren IP Reputation Checker
A simple IP reputation checker that allows you to verify how your IP is seen by mailbox providers. Along with the reputation/risk level, this website provides a short description of what the risk level means.
Though it’s not too helpful in improving your reputation, it’s a good place to begin tracking your reputation.
The Manual Steps to Improve your IP Reputation
Understanding how email reputation tracking companies do their job gives us enough insight into what we need to do to improve our domain reputation.
- That’s because we now know that we have to take care of:
- Sending good quality emails with clear information
- Emailing only to users that “asked for” the emails (not a random purchased list)
- Keeping bounce rates in check so your email efforts aren’t wasted
- Sending consistent volumes so the servers understand your sending habits.
- This brings us back to some of the older blogs that we’ve written on how to improve your domain reputation, improve deliverability rates, warm-up techniques, heartbeat campaigns, and many more.
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Conclusion
I hope you have a better understanding of your current IP reputation. Once you know the reputation of your IP at present, it’s time to take the steps to improve your IP reputation. But always remember, if you’re using a shared IP (if you’re not sure, then you’re most likely using a shared IP), the IP reputation also depends on what steps your bulk email service provider takes to maintain and improve the reputation.
With Pepipost, we take extra care to ensure your domain and IP reputation is at its best. Apart from that, you also have an option to take full control of your IP reputation by opting for a dedicated IP. Netcore Pepipost is free to start – click here to try us out.