Clean  E-mail Reputation

Companies who use e-mail to communicate to their members or lists need to step up their efforts to be good e-mail citizens, and to make sure they don't send out unwanted messages. An outside consultant can help to oversee your e-mail delivery.

For a small investment of your company’s time and money you can avoid having your messages junked by spam filters.  This may be of significant value to you if your company relies on e-mail to do business.

It has become more of a challenge to send e-mail because the ISPs are taking certain actions to catch illegitimate mailers, legitimate mailers have to take action to make sure that they are not caught in the same net.

In reputation-based filtering, senders are graded on their practices and assigned a reputation score based on several variables, such as complaint rates, volume of mail sent and response to unsubscribe requests. It's one of the latest techniques used to combat the problem of spam, which makes up more than 80 percent of all messages sent today.

Also in response to spam, e-mail service providers are aggressively filtering messages to keep the medium useful for their customers. That, allied to the reputation push, is putting a burden on companies to meet the requirements of those providers. If they don't, they risk a slur on their character--and a subsequent ding to their business.

It is important to adhere to the policies that most spam filters recognize, like proper formatting, to ensure that the e-mails are delivered to your users' in-boxes and not junk/spam or bulk boxes.

As a result, e-mail is no longer an easy and cheap way to get messages out to a large number of people, but one that needs careful management.

Your E-mail Reputation Score

Industry experts liken an e-mail reputation to a driving record or a credit score. With a bad driving record, you pay more in insurance premiums. With a low credit score, you don't get good rates on loans. If your e-mail reputation is bad, your mail gets junked.

But if you have a credit score problem, you really only need to hit the three agencies that maintain those records. It's a lot tougher for businesses that want to set their e-mail reputation straight: Hundreds of places compute e-mail reputations, and they may all do it in a different way.

The actual reputation data is distributed among hundreds of antispam vendors and ISPs.It would be easier if there was a central database of good mailers as opposed to bad mailers. However, if one Internet service provider delivers a company's mail, others will likely deliver it too, since practices are similar.
The e-mail reputation the score is based on six factors: complaints, percentage of mail sent to nonexistent addresses, number of mail hitting spam traps, response to unsubscribe requests, sending infrastructure and mail volume.

The reputation will be attached to the sender's domain or IP address. Reputation systems may weigh the components differently, depending on their place in the e-mail chain. A spam-filtering appliance or hosted service may give more weight to e-mail volume and patterns, while for an e-mail service provider, the customer complaint rate might be most important.

For companies curious about their e-mail reputation, there are online services that will give them some insight into it.

If your business is based on best practices, and your customers are treated appropriately, the ISPs want to deliver that mail. They are not going to hold back good mail from their customers if they are confident that the businesses sending that mail are doing the right things.