When Inboxbooster tells you you have an email reputation problem, this means your IP or your sending domain has been flagged by a mail server for spamming. It was so bad that they decided that your future emails would be sent to spam.

There are only three causes: 

• You were sending “bad” emails enough that the spam filter barred you from sending
• You are starting a new domain (or a new IP), and the “warm-up” phase wasn’t done properly
• You are sharing part of your infrastructure with someone else who is guilty of sending unwanted emails

These causes are not exclusive, and sometimes they add up together.

What is a “Bad” Email

What we mean by “bad emails” are emails the spam filter thinks their users don’t want. Spam filters analyze user behavior and optimize to remove unwanted emails. For instance, an unwanted email is an email you’ll delete after skimming through it or one that simply goes unread. 

Important points to note

• It’s, of course, a gross simplification. Here’s an example to explain the complexity of the problem: you might delete a payment receipt, but you still want it. A machine can only read that you don’t like it, which sends a negative signal to spam filters regarding future emails from the same sender. 
• Spam filters use various techniques to figure it out and “outplay” the multiple actors trying to outsmart them.

Why Reputation

Spam filters use Email Reputation to save money. Analyzing an email is cheap, but they receive hundreds of billions of emails daily, which gets costly.

Because spam is a problem at scale, there is a correlation between some “permanent element” of your infrastructure (e.g. domain name, URL). So when this correlation is detected, spam filters don’t need to analyze your emails further: they move it to spam “without thinking” (i.e., spending CPU cycle on your emails).

A helpful analogy to better understand domain/ IP reputation is a borrower’s credit score. If you borrow money without paying it back, your credit score is negatively impacted. Doing this will eventually result in lenders being unwilling to give you money at all. Once spam filters view you as a sender who isn’t changing their sending practices, they won’t give you a chance to reach your inbox. Sending bad emails, such as irrelevant or low-quality content, can damage a domain and IP reputation. 

In Closing

When you hit the spam folder because of an issue with your domain reputation, often the hard truth is that your sending practices need to change. 

A damaged domain reputation is really spam filters telling you that you’re sending emails that people don’t want to receive. 
Inboxbooster can monitor your inbox placement in real time and help you identify the root cause of spam placement. We can provide recommendations to comply with spam filters (not game them). If you would like to schedule a meeting with us to discuss your inbox placement and next steps, you can do so HERE. We would love to help!