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Forums/Official SendGrid/FAQ: Email Deliverability
Your Reputation... What is it?
Joe Scharf
posted this on April 07, 2010 09:49
On the Account Overview page of the SendGrid website, you can find your SendGrid account reputation. This reputation is a indicator of how we view your email sending practices.
How is Reputation Computed?
The SendGrid account reputation is computed based on a calculation of:
- The percentage of requests that are able to be Delivered (Delivered / Requests). This takes into account Bounces, Invalid Emails, and Drops (Repeat bounces, unsubscribes, etc.) Please review our Delivery Metrics article for more detail on these terms.
- Spam Reports. Each spam report is a user actively rejecting your mail, and has a strong negative affect
The Effect of Reputation on your Account
Depending on your package level, your Reputation can matter more or less. At all levels, if your Reputation is low enough, your account will come under review by our AD&D team, and you may be contacted, and your account may be suspended for review.
If you're on a Bronze or Lite package, for the first month your account is in a "New" IP cluster while we learn your sending habits. After that, you're placed in an IP cluster with other customers with the same reputation range as you. This keeps the good senders together, and prevents the poorer senders from harming the good ones.
If you're a Silver package or higher, you have a dedicated IP, and our internal Reputation metric does not have as much weight. Instead, you should keep a closer eye on your external reputation. Every receiving server has their own score of you, which they generally "forget" after a couple of weeks of no sending habits. Sites such as SenderScore are a good way to get an idea of your external reputation.
SendGrid's Reputation Policy:
We regularly monitor our customers' account reputation for abuse and undesirable sending practices. Our general guidelines for account reputation take into account the following reputation thresholds:
- Reputation above 80%: Congratulations, you have a good sending reputation and there are no issues at this time.
- Reputation between 70% and 80%: This is considered a poor reputation and actions should be taken immediately to identify and fix problems with your sending practices.
- Reputation below 70%: Accounts with reputations below 70% will be subject to immediate suspension or termination.
Comments
Feature request: add reputation to Web API response (profile or stats)
Among the factors for reputation calculation mentioned in the post, the first is neutral and others are negative. It would be more comprehensive and reasonable to include engagement metrics such as opens and clicks.
How to deal with bounces produced by user-inputted emails ? services where users have to manually type emails (like invitations for example) will inevitably produce bounces, because of typos, false emails, etc... We usually see between 15% and 20% bounce rate for this kind of mails.
How much will our reputation be impacted by 20% of bounces ?
To sendgrid:
For the problem which Antoine mentioned, I have some ideas as below.
Is there anyway to increase reputation? I don't want to wake up and suddenly see my account gone.
When we try to send out an email through our server, we have to deal with ISP and if we use sendgrid, we have to deal with sendgrid reputation score.. What's the point really to use sendgrid if now we are doing the same as we do with ISP's. Also I did not see any sendgrid response in this thread anyway to help us out on some of the question some user posted here.. It's just not helpful.
Antoine and Eric DM , were you guys able to solve your issue ? I have the same issue and that is user generated bounced emails and I am losing reputation fast..
I'm a first time user and sending to a large list that hasn't been trimmed of invalid emails for a while (the old system didn't have a way to track it). My reputation is dropping a lot and I'm afraid my reputation will drop below 70. Of course after this sends I plan on using the data to eliminate all of the bounced emails from my list. But how can I avoid being banned from this first email blast?
This is my 1st blast and my reputation drops to 88%. how to increase my reputation?
thanks!
Hi,
I contacted the support and was advised to send mails to my inbox to raise my reputation. I find it weird to be obliged to spam myself to raise my spam reputation !
Would SendGrid kindly respond to to the issues raised here? We are also dealing with a database cleansing since we run a viral campaign a few months ago had had people refer their friends. the ISP bottlenecks presented a massive problem as nothing was trackable. During test blasts reputation was over 95% but as we churn through the numbers, there are numerous spelling mistakes on domain names, spaces and other issues that will cause bouncing and rejection. This has obviously affected the score drastically but the database cleansing must be done! What to do
I am concerned about the same issue. User generated invalid emails are hurting our reputation. Using viral features to generate traffic for our site relies upon user input, which is the greatest source of invalid emails and SPAM. Anything SendGrid can do to at least make sure our reputation is protected from SPAM bots, user error, or the like that generate invalid emails, bounces, and other reputation killing emaisl?
No. sendgrid does not respond to tehese topics either here or in the support center!
I am having big trouble with hotmail users, and am sending from/to portugal and the translation of the hotmail screen says "trash" instead of "spam" so perople after reading they put tehm in the trash, without ever noticing what really they are doing....
It is crazy!
Sorry for the lack of response; we had not been receiving notification of posts on here, but have corrected the issue.
We're working on updating this document, so I'm closing this to comments. We will have the updated article up soon and be taking new comments there.
Starting form the top:
Matt M - That is a request in GS, please go vote for it. The more votes, the faster we'll work on it.
Eric DM (1) - The metric has been updated, and is now roughly: Delivered/Requests - Spam Reports. This wraps the "bounces" & "invalid emails" into the first part; the higher the percentage of mail that's getting through, the better. The only thing that's actively bad is the Spam Reports. I don't see us using open & clicks however, since many users send legitimate mail that would not generate those metrics, and we don't want them to be at a disadvantage.
Antoine - The best thing you can do is have them "verify" their address by retyping, and send an opt-in confirmation. The first will reduce the likelihood of accidental typos, and the second will make sure you never get more than 1 bounce per bad email address. You should be confirming opt-ins anyway, and we do hold you liable for the addresses you send to. a 20% bounce rate is pretty high, and would put your account under Review.
Eric DM (2) - No, we do not and have no plans to provide a "cleaning service" or check. There's scripts out there that will help you confirm validity, but it's up to you and your customer to make sure you have a good address. So long as you're sending mail they want, they'll make sure you have the right address. If you send a confirmation and it bounces, that will technically count against you, but overall a single bounce per address won't cause much harm. Regarding two different types of mail, we do support having multiple IPs & whitelabels, so that their reputations are unique, and they can have different App settings. However, they should both still have good deliverability, and you're responsible for them both the same way.
Sales, Webmaster - Send more mail that's delivered.
Info - That's the point; we only want good senders who will send mail the recipients want in our system in the first place. Our job here is to help people get their good mail out, not to help spammers get their mail out, and we don't want to be known as such. We defend or external reputation my monitoring your internal one, and if you're not following good sending practices, we'll remove you from our system.
Point4design - We don't support or condone 'list cleaning' on your service. If we catch you doing so, your account may be closed. I recommend you verify addresses outside of SendGrid.
Business - "friend referral" is technically unsolicited mail. We understand that it's a legitimate mail practice, but you're still liable for any bad addresses, bounces, and spam reports. We suggest limiting how many "friends" people can invite at once, and don't provide incentives that would cause your customers to provide bad/old address. When people send to their whole address book through your service, you'll end up sending to bad addresses and spamtraps/honeypots, which will only hurt you.
Caban - If people are "accidentally" marking messages as spam, you may want to report that to Hotmail's support. I would also suggest making sure your email has a prominent unsubscribe option in the header, to increase the chance of people using that instead.