There's a process in place before your email ever hits your subscriber's inbox. The reputation of the IP/domain you're sending from gets checked many steps along the way. ISPs/mail services, routers and spam filters want to know they can trust you.

Reputation guides whether your message is delivered, marked as spam, or blocked all-together. 

Reputation is an index of trust. This trust grows or shrinks every time you send to your list. How are you graded? We're glad you asked! It factors in the quality of your address list, the content, technical infrastructure, and your engagement rate. These are key for good deliverability. Things like repeated bounces, spamming, or using spam-trap addresses will harm your reputation. The more often you email, the more small issues will negatively affect your rating.  

Use "responsive" addresses

If one or more addresses on your list are unreachable, your bounce rates will increase. Even if it's only temporary. A double opt-in address collection will help to prevent this from happening.

A good list manager automatically cleans up your mailing list based on this type of feedback. Software like Cakemail removes the contact itself. This helps to improve the reputation of your domain and our IP. If an email address that no longer exists, best to not reach out.

Entrust the routing to an email solution

So you've chosen your email platform. Now you ask yourself about the IP used for your routing. Should it a shared or dedicated IP?

Using your own IP address is a good idea — your actions directly influence its reputation. That way no other organization can have a negative impact on your sending. If you want to always be optimize your deliverability, you are safe.. in theory. But do be careful. You'll need a substantial sending volume. It'll be necessary though to go through a warm-up IP step prepared by your provider.

Shared IPs can also be a great solution. As a service provider, we provide these addresses for you. We track, detect and take the right measures against users abusing the system. We curate these IP address ranges to guarantee deliverability for our customers.

Know your reputation scores

Some organizations specialize in the fight against spam. They'll publish their own reputation score. You can go to their site and submit the IP address or domain used for your email campaigns. They offer to help the people concerned about filtering by publishing this information. With Cakemail, you won't have to worry about these scores at all. by Helping our customers ensure their good reputation is part of our job.

Learn about blacklists

The worst situation is getting blacklisted. There are dozens of blacklists out there. Two big names are Cisco's popular SpamCop or Barracuda, both spam information services. Their job is to detect, among all IP addresses, abnormal behaviour that might be spam. Their algorithms are very complex and their methods get more and more advanced.

One approach is the spam-trap. This trap leaves email addresses on the Web, waiting for a spammer to discover it with a bot and use it. This type of behaviour leads quickly to blacklisting, without a chance for restitution.

Other aspects of deliverability

Besides your reputation, other factors affect your ability to deliver your campaigns:

• Authenticate yourself to gain transparency and trust with anti-spam agencies.

• Optimize your content and avoid basic email mistakes.

• Create and maintain your mailing lists well to show your seriousness and commitment.

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