Check Your Email Reputation in 2026:  A Step-by-Step Guide

Email reputation, also known as sender reputation, is a trust score assigned to your sending IPs, domains, and email addresses.

This score decides where your emails land after they are sent.

That could be the:

• Primary Tab
• Promotional Tab
• Updates Tab
• Spam Folder
• Or in some cases, not delivered at all

In simple terms:
Your entire email performance depends on this score.

That is why regularly monitoring your email reputation is important.

In this blog, I will explain all you need to know about email reputation, how to check it, and even where to check it in 2026.

Keep reading!

What Is an Email Reputation Check?

An email reputation check gives you insight into how well Email Service Providers (ESPs) trust your email accounts and domains.

By doing an email reputation check, you can find out where your emails are likely to land —

• In the inbox (where they should be)
• In the promotions or updates tab (where they might get ignored)
• Or worse, straight into the spam folder (where they’ll probably never be seen).

So, what do ESPs use to decide whether your emails deserve the inbox or the spam folder – email sender reputation.

What Is Email Reputation or Sender Reputation?

You already got a brief idea of email reputation in the introduction. Now let me break it down properly.

Email reputation is the level of trust assigned to you as a sender based on your email sending behavior and recipient engagement.

It is usually assigned by:

1. Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.
2. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that manage and filter email traffic at the network level.

The reputation is usually assigned to:

1. Your email accounts
2. The domains you send emails from
3. The IP addresses used for sending

Your email reputation, or sender reputation, is evaluated based on multiple factors.

Each ESP and ISP uses its own internal and proprietary evaluation systems to decide how trustworthy you are as a sender.

Based on this assessment, your emails may be delivered to the inbox, filtered into other tabs, sent to spam, or blocked entirely.

There is no way to see or access an exact email reputation score. Email providers do not disclose how their scoring systems work or the weight given to individual signals.ext section.

What Are the Key Factors That Affect Email Reputation?

Email reputation is built over time based on how you send emails and how recipients respond to them.

Email providers look at multiple signals together. Here are some of them:

1. Sending Behavior and Consistency
2. Recipient Engagement
3. Spam Complaints
4. Bounce Rates
5. Email Authentication Setup
6. Sending Infrastructure
7. Content Signals

1. Sending Behavior and Consistency

Email providers closely monitor how often you send emails and how consistent your sending patterns are over time.

Sudden spikes in volume, irregular schedules, or aggressive scaling can raise red flags and negatively affect your reputation.

At the same time, sending in an overly predictable or robotic pattern can also hurt trust. 

Providers expect natural sending behavior that grows gradually and stays stable.

2. Recipient Engagement

How your recipients interact with your emails plays a huge role.

These interactions are direct signals from real users, which makes them highly valuable for ESPs and ISPs 

Positive signals include:

1. Opens
2. Replies
3. Clicks
4. Moving emails to the inbox from Spam or other tabs

On the flip side, negative signals include:

1. Ignored emails
2. Deletions without opening
3. Lack of replies
4. Marking as Spam (strongest negative intent)

Strong engagement improves reputation, while weak engagement slowly damages it.

3. Spam Complaints

Spam complaints from your recipients are one of the strongest negative signals for email reputation.

When a recipient marks your email as spam, it tells ESPs and ISPs that your message was unwanted or misleading.

Even a small number of spam complaints can impact your reputation, especially if you are sending emails at scale or from a newer domain or IP.

This is why it is important to send emails only to the right recipients.

• For email marketing, send emails only to users who have opted in to receive your messages.
• For cold emailing, reach out only to recipients who are highly relevant and likely to need what you offer.

This approach helps keep spam complaints low and protects your sender reputation.

Also Read:How to Build a Cold Email List That’s Clean, Accurate, & Ready To Send

4. Bounce Rates

After spam complaints, the next major red flag for email reputation is high bounce rates.

Bounces happen when your emails cannot be delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

This usually occurs because the email address is invalid, inactive, or temporarily unavailable.

There are two common types of bounces:

• Hard bounces: Permanent failures caused by invalid or non existent email addresses
• Soft bounces: Temporary delivery issues such as full inboxes or server problems

Both types can harm your reputation if they occur frequently.

This is why you should clean your email list from time to time.

Also Read:How to Fix Bounced Emails? (And Prevent Them for Good)

5. Email Authentication Setup

Setting up your authentication records is a non-negotiable.

This is especially true if you are sending bulk email or cold emails!

If your authentication is missing or incorrectly configured, email providers may treat your messages as untrustworthy.

Common authentication protocols include SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Together, they confirm your sender identity and, at the same time, protect recipients from phishing and impersonation attempts.

6. Sending Infrastructure

ESPs and ISPs also evaluate your entire sending infrastructure:

• IP addresses
• Domain
• And email accounts you use to send emails.

New domains, poorly warmed IPs, or shared infrastructure with a negative sending history can hurt your email reputation, even if your content and targeting are solid.

Also Read: How to Easily Warm Up Your Domains Before Outreach in 2025

When you use shared IPs, your deliverability can be affected by the behavior of other senders on the same infrastructure.

A single bad actor can damage the reputation of the entire IP.

Maintaining a clean sending setup, warming up new domains and IPs gradually, and avoiding risky shared infrastructure helps build and protect your sender reputation over time.

7. Content Signals

Email providers also analyze the content of your emails to spot spam or low-quality patterns.

They look at things like:

• Subject lines
• Message structure and formatting
• Repeated templates across campaigns
• Overuse of promotional or sales-heavy language

Poor content combined with low engagement, spam complaints, or bounces significantly increases the chances of reputation damage

So, make sure your emails are simple, easy to understand, and to the point.

Also Read: Cold Email Personalization: All You Need To Know in 2026

These are just few of the many factors that ESPs and ISPs check.

In the next section, I will share how you can check your email reputation.

How to Do an Email Reputation Check Using Dedicated Tools?

Now that we’ve explored what email reputation is and why it’s critically important, let’s find out how to check email reputation.

And if you’re worried that this might be a challenging, even difficult process, don’t be! I’ve curated a list of 5 very simple tools you can use to check your email sender reputation.

Let’s check them out one by one:

1. Google’s Postmaster Tools
2. Sender Score
3. MxToolbox
4. Talos Intelligence
5. Microsoft SNDS

1. Google’s Postmaster Tools

Google’s native Postmaster Tools is a free-to-use platform that helps you visualize and analyze your email deliverability.

It’s a very simple tool that offers a wealth of data on your email account’s deliverability metrics. Using Postmaster Tools, you can examine your:

• Email Sender Reputation
• Spam and Spam Complaint Rate
• Authentication Records Status
• Delivery Errors or Bounce Rates

2. Sender Score

Sender Score is another great tool that helps you understand your email sender reputation and get information on your domain health.

It assigns you a score between 0 and 100 based on your email infrastructure, sending patterns, and IP reputation. 

Here’s what makes Sender Score different from a basic platform like Google’s Postmaster Tools:

• It allows you to understand why your emails are bouncing
• It helps you verify your email lists
• It enables you to monitor ESP blocklists 
• It lets you compare your deliverability benchmarks against global standards

3. MxToolbox

MxToolbox is one of my favorite email reputation checker tools because it gives you a detailed report on five different aspects of your email reputation.

These include:

• Basic problems with your email authentication
• A DNS check that ensures that your email is configured properly
• Blacklist report to ensure you’re not blocked from sending emails
• A server test to help you understand whether specific ESPs are blocking your emails
• A web server check that enables you to check if a web server is flagging your emails

Moreover, MxToolbox also has a paid service where you get solutions to fix any issues hampering your sender reputation.

4. Talos Intelligence

Talos Intelligence is a free-to-use, Cisco-powered email reputation checker. 

It helps you understand two major things: 

• Whether your email has been blacklisted
• The reputation of your domain

One thing I like about Talos Intelligence is that it helps you submit a ticket if you think that your domain has been unfairly blacklisted!

Plus, you can also use Talos to understand global spam email sender and spam data, filtered by region and hosting services provider!

5. Microsoft SNDS

Just like Google, Microsoft also has its own native email reputation checker service, called the Smart Network Data Service, or SNDS.

SNDS is a dedicated email reputation checker that primarily works with Outlook. Its main goal is to help you understand and manage your email reputation. 

It does so by providing you with detailed reports on spam complaints and helping you resolve deliverability issues.

What Are the Best Practices to Follow to Have a High Email Reputation?

I’ll share a few best practices that you can follow to make sure your email sender reputation stays strong and your emails consistently land in the inbox.

1. Authenticate Your Email Account
2. Get Email Lists from Trusted B2B Data Vendors
3. Use Double-Opt-In for Marketing Emails
4. Use an Automated Email Warm-Up Tool

1. Authenticate Your Email Account

Email authentication is one of the most critical aspects of your email infrastructure – It helps you avoid phishing and spoofing attacks.

According to ESP guidelines, there are three authentication records you must set up:

• SPF: Sender Policy Framework
• DKIM: Domain-Keys Identified Mail
• DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance

2. Get Email Lists from Trusted B2B Data Vendors

As we’ve seen, high bounce rates can severely reduce your email sender reputation.

This is usually due to two reasons:

First, you’ve either made a small error in typing an email address. This is an easily fixable error, especially if you use an email verification platform before sending emails. 

Second, you’ve bought an email list from an unverified vendor. Again, I recommend eliminating this problem by only getting email lists from trusted B2B data providers!

3. Use Double-Opt-In for Marketing Emails

In recent years, privacy has come to play a huge role in determining sender reputation. This is largely due to legal requirements that stress compliance with privacy laws of different countries and regions.

To avoid a drop in your sender reputation because of this, I suggest using a double opt-in mechanism for marketing purposes.

It’s a simple way of obtaining the consent of your recipients when they sign up for your email list!

4. Use an Automated Email Warm-Up Tool

I’ve often noticed that people struggle to increase the sender reputation of their new or dormant email accounts.

And this happens even though they’ve followed all the best practices I’ve mentioned above.

So, what’s the solution in such cases? 

Simple: establishing a pattern of sending emails to and receiving replies from highly reputable email accounts. 

And that’s where an automated email warm-up tool comes in! It will: 

• Send a set number of emails to highly reputable email accounts 
• Open the emails, take them out of the spam folder, and mark them important
• Reply to a percentage of the emails sent through your email account
• Gradually increase the number of emails sent and replies received

In short, an automated email warm-up tool will help you win the trust of your ESP by creating human-like conversational threads through your email account!

Don’t Leave Your Deliverability to Chance!

A high email reputation is a prerequisite for successful cold emailing and lead generation.

Simply put, it’s too important to leave to chance or half-measures…

What you need is a surefire way that guarantees a high email sender reputation – and that’s exactly what TrulyInbox offers!

Sign up for the forever-free plan and experience how successful email warm-up can supercharge your email deliverability…

What is Email Reputation Check: FAQs

1. How often should you check your email reputation?

In my opinion, you should check your email reputation at least once a week if you want to ensure that your emails are landing in your recipients’ inboxes. However, if you rely on email marketing to generate leads, I recommend checking it every day that you’re running an outreach campaign. 

2. What is the best way to check email reputation?

From what I’ve seen, the best way to check your email reputation is to use a free tool like Google’s Postmaster Tools or Sender Score. Such tools will help you track key deliverability metrics and provide a visual understanding of your email sender reputation.

3. How to improve email reputation?

The best way to improve your sender reputation is to use an automated email warm-up tool. It’ll help you establish a pattern of email conversations with highly reputable email accounts and win the trust of your ESPs.