Why Businesses Need to Check Their Email Reputation, and How to Do It

When your business email reputation is poor, you may not even know it, but your emails might get flagged as spam, be blocked by some servers, or simply not get delivered. When that happens, your poor email reputation will start to affect your business reputation, which will hinder your ability to communicate with existing customers and to reach potential customers. Maintaining a good email reputation is critical if you want to be able to continue to use email as a reliable means of communication.

Companies such as Return Path and Sender Score can help you keep track of your email sender reputation and assign reputation scores. Email servers, email hosting companies, and services such as Gmail and Outlook may use these scores to help decide whether to block your emails, mark them as spam or deliver them normally. You need to periodically check your email reputation to make sure your emails are being received reliably.

Your Email Reputation Can Be Affected by Many Different Factors

Even when email services don’t refer to scores kept by third parties, they still use the same kind of criteria to determine what to do with your emails. Typical factors that affect email reputation are spam complaints, unusually large numbers of emails being sent, and frequent “unsubscribe” requests from marketing campaigns. The email marketing industry also keeps blacklists of email servers used to send large quantities of unsolicited emails.

Sometimes a company’s server is temporarily hijacked to send out spam, or spammers might use the company’s email address as the return address. In many cases, companies don’t know when this happens and suddenly their email reputation is poor and emails are getting blocked.

DMARC Sets Rules That Many Email Services Use

The Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) policy for email authentication is followed by many email servers. It builds on the widely used Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) method to help prevent email sender forging. Both allow the receiver to check that email claiming to be from a specific domain is in fact authorized by the owner of that domain.

DMARC takes the results from SPF and DKIM verifications and classifies received emails accordingly. Authenticated emails are “passed” while questionable emails are “quarantined” or “rejected.” DMARC can send a report on rejected emails to a specified email address, allowing email recipients to identify potential problems with their own systems or with those of their business partners.

Your Email Reputation Can Be Protected by Using Authenticated Email

Protecting your email sender reputation while also blocking fraudulent emails you receive is very difficult without using email validation software. When unauthorized emails were fewer, companies would sometimes keep blacklists of email addresses from which they did not want to receive email. Today, parsing incoming emails and blocking individual addresses would be immensely time-consuming and it would have to be done on a continuous basis as spammers continuously change servers and spoof email addresses.

Email validation software uses DMARC and other tools to authenticate the emails you send and to help protect your email system from fraudulent emails such as phishing emails or those containing malware. Managed IT services company GSDSolutions uses Valimail for its customers, as do companies such as Uber and other large corporations. Alternatives include Emailable, which protects your email and your email sender reputation, and Avanan, which specializes in cloud email security.

Using a managed IT services provider to help set up email validation for your company will help your business run smoothly. They will help ensure that mails you send will be received reliably by the addressee, sophisticated attacks such as ransomware or phishing won’t get through, and spammers can’t use your email addresses because the email servers can be trusted not to pass on any spoofed emails. By ensuring that your email system can’t be used fraudulently, you can maintain a positive email sender reputation.

Email reputation monitoring is another way to protect your business against online threats that are multiplying and becoming more serious.

GSDSolutions Can Validate Your Email System

As a leading provider of business IT services in the Bay area, GSDSolutions can help you set up email validation for your company’s email system. Give us a call to let us evaluate how you use your email and propose the best solutions for your business.