Email domain score is what determines whether an email gets delivered or if it ends up in spam folders. It is determined by mailbox providers based on a combination of factors such as engagement, spam trap hits and email-sending best practices. The more positive the domain reputation, the easier it is to get emails delivered.

A healthy domain reputation is often indicated by a high score on reputation databases, coupled with good feedback from ESP diagnostic tools. A high score suggests that your emails are generally well-received by subscribers and that you have a low spam complaint rate. Mailbox providers use complex algorithms to evaluate a domain and then check it while scanning future messages to establish a level of trust.

Understanding Email Domain Scores and Their Impact on Deliverability

While most of the deliverability best practices are technical in nature, the one that has the greatest impact on your domain reputation is to send emails that your subscribers want to receive and read. This ensures that the messages you send appear legitimate to the computers that handle them and keeps your reputation high.

Having a strong email domain reputation will not only make it easier to reach your subscribers’ inboxes but also improve the overall performance of your emails and the brand you are trying to build. While it would be great to have a way of knowing exactly how mailbox providers judge email reputation, most will not publicly share how they assign it as the more that is shared, the harder it is for spammers and other nefarious senders to game the system. There are however some free online tools that aggregate reputation scores from multiple receivers to give you a sense of how your domain is doing.