Sender reputation

Four families of input, roughly in order of weight: complaints, bounces and invalid addresses, engagement — opens, replies, whether recipients rescue mail from spam — and pattern, meaning whether your volume and timing look like a business or like a burst.

Authentication is the entry ticket rather than a score. Passing SPF, DKIM and DMARC does not make you reputable; failing them means the rest is barely considered.

Reputation falls in days and recovers in weeks. A single bad campaign can undo months of careful sending, and there is no appeal process — you send less, send better, and wait. That asymmetry is the entire argument for caps, ramps and automatic pauses: they cost a little volume in exchange for not needing to recover.

It is also why reputation is worth treating as an asset on the balance sheet rather than as a metric on a dashboard. It took time to build and it cannot be bought back.

You cannot read your reputation. You can read the things it is made of — bounce rate, complaint rate, reply rate — and you can observe where your mail lands by sending to addresses you control. Those two together are as close as anyone gets.

Be sceptical of any tool claiming to display your reputation as a single authoritative number. It is a model of a model, and the underlying judgement belongs to each receiving provider separately.

SalesShift does not claim to read a provider's reputation. It scores each mailbox from telemetry it can actually observe — bounces, complaints, transport failures, replies and opens over a rolling 30-day window — and publishes the formula so the number can be reconstructed rather than trusted.