How reputable is your IP address? Find out your Sender Score

What is a Sender Score? It’s a rating on a 1-100 scale which helps email clients like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and others determine whether the IP address sending an email is reputable (i.e. not a spammer). The score isn’t fixed, but dynamic, and may change with every sendout due to factors such as the number of complaints received (marking an email as spam), unsubscribes or undelivered mails. (Conversely, messages from a spam box that get marked as Not Spam will work to improve the score.)Return Path warns that a Sender Score below 70 means your IP address’s sendouts will be aggressively filtered but it’s important to remember that every email client weighs the sender score in its own unique way when deciding which IP addresses to filter or block.Suffice to say the lower your score is, the more likely your email will end up in your recipient’s spam or junk mail box.

Find out your Sender Score

If you want to you know your IP sender score―or that of anybody sending you email―here’s a quick way to find it.

Select an email. You can test any email you’re about to send out, or any you’ve just received. For the purposes of this test, I’m going to use a piece of spam―a car company ad―that Yahoo filtered and dropped straight in my spam box.

First you need to get the sender’s IP address. You can find it by viewing the Full Header. In Yahoo you do that by clicking on More and then View Full Header, but here are some links to other mail client tutorials, like Gmail and Outlook.

Find the IP address. It’s the 12-digit number, with groups of three digits separated by dots. In this case:185.124.110.143Copy the IP address and go to Return Path’s senderscore.org. Paste the IP address and click on View Partial Report. And there’s the sender score:

19. Ouch. Way below 70. No wonder it ended up in my spam box. I didn’t ask for it, and I’ll probably be one of many who will unsubscribe.Don’t be that sender. If you want to make sure your marketing emails get to your reader’s inbox, one thing to do is to make sure your IP address has a reputable sender score. And the way to keep your score up is to make sure that you’re sending to an updated list of your own clients and readers who’ve opted in to receive your newsletter and email marketing. Not a cheap, bought list.