Especially when receiving large amounts of emails from the same sender, providers tend to also classify legitimate messages as spam. This is irrespective of the content, and only based on the sheer volume of emails received in a short time. This effect can be counteracted, however, with successful reputation management.
To ensure the delivery rate of your emails remains consistently high, your email reputation as a sender is of crucial importance. Or, more precisely, the public reputation of your sender IP or domain. If a sender’s emails are classified as spam more often, their rating falls – and the probability of future emails ending up spam folders rises accordingly. A poor reputation can also lead to long-lasting blocklisting by the large email providers. Emails received from senders who have been placed on these lists are then promptly rejected by the provider – and don’t even make it to the recipient’s spam folder.
Why a suppression list is vital for your reputation management
To avoid this and keep your own reputation at a consistently high level, effective and proactive reputation management is essential. In this regard, Retarus brings a whole raft of measures to bear. One of these is the suppression list. Some background: When emails are transmitted, it often occurs that messages can’t be delivered, either temporarily or permanently. For instance, because a free mail account’s storage space is full, or the address no longer exists. In such cases, the email provider sends a notification back to the sender. While this may seem of little consequence to you as a sender, each event is precisely recorded by the provider and repeated bounces are assessed as illegitimate use of email transmission. This leads to the reputation being downgraded further and further, culminating in the blocklisting of the sender. While the transmission of soft bounces (e.g., out of office) can certainly be attempted repeatedly, hard bounces (e.g., user unknown) should immediately be recognized as such and any further attempts to deliver the message must be discontinued. Otherwise, the sender reputation is bound to be impacted negatively.
Suppression list prevents the resending of messages to invalid recipients
With Retarus Transactional Email, non-existing email addresses are therefore automatically placed on a suppression list. In this way, multiple attempts to send emails to previously rejected recipient addresses is effectively prevented. This gives senders the opportunity to clean their distribution lists accordingly. The suppression list also blocks the sending of messages to spam traps or honey pots, which are special email addresses used by email providers to collect spam messages and analyze the behavior of senders. Intelligent solutions for sending emails recognize such addresses and domains, allowing them to be filtered out from amongst the recipients and being automatically listed. A huge advantage of the service is that the information gathered on invalid email addresses is added to Retarus’ global suppression list, allowing it to be used for the benefit of all the platform’s users.
Status information available automatically via API callback
By the way, the status information gathered by the Reputation Management service is also made available by Retarus via API callback (Webhook). By way of HTTP POST, these details can automatically be integrated into business processes and applications. In this way, Retarus supports companies in maintaining their master data (database hygiene) as well as with their active bounce and traffic management – boosting the sender reputation of the customer’s domain sustainably. Apart from information about recipients placed on the suppression list, this status information includes events regarding the delivery status, reasons for non-delivery and statistics on open & link tracking.
In addition to the suppression list, there are several other technical and organizational measures that contribute to optimum reputation management. Find out more in our Deliverability Guide.
