The Sender Score tile in Return Path Platform gives you invaluable information about key metrics that drive sender reputation and provides insight into your company's performance with Return Path's Sender Score ranking tool.

The metrics reported in the Sender Score tile include:

• Complaints: The complaint rate represents the rate at which subscribers complain to mailbox providers. A spam complaint is generated when subscribers click on the spam or junk button within their email application. Complaint rates are calculated as spam complaint messages divided by delivered email. If the complaint rate is higher than what the mailbox provider considers acceptable, different degrees of filtering occur. This includes email being directed to the bulk folder, temporary blocking, and the permanent blocking of email.
  
  

• Message filtered: The message-filtered rate is the percentage of deployed email that was accepted at the gateway by the mailbox provider, but filtered into the bulk folder or not delivered to the inbox.
  
  

• Sender rejected: Rejected email is defined as any message blocked during the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) conversation. Mailbox providers primarily reject email based on key reputation drivers, such as complaint rates, spam trap hits, unknown user rates, third-party filtering, and blocklisting status.
  
  

• Infrastructure (reverse Domain Name System [rDNS] and host): Infrastructure refers to the actual hardware used to deploy your emails or to have your emails deployed on your behalf by a mailbox provider. The hardware is commonly referred to as your Mail Transport Agent (MTA).
  
  

• Volume: Sending volume represents the frequency and quantity of email sent. Red flags for mailbox providers are sudden increases in quantity of email sent, inconsistent behavior in quantity of email sent, and regularly high quantities of email sent. From a mailbox provider's perspective, a consistent sender is the best sender.

  • Note: Volume in the Sender Score tile represents a rolling average, not the sending volume for a given day. For example, if you graph Volume over 7 days and hover over one data point, the volume given is the 7-day average on that date.
    
    

• Unknown users: Unknown users are invalid addresses in a sender's database. A high unknown user rate is an indicator of poor data hygiene or suspicious address collection practices. An example of an unknown user email is: donotreply@rp.com (because the owner of this domain would not have signed up for an email program) or name@yahoo.comm. Most mailbox providers view high unknown user rates as characteristic of spammer email streams.
  
  

• Spam traps: Spam traps are email addresses activated by mailbox providers for the sole purpose of catching illegitimate email and identifying senders with poor data collection practices. These traps cannot and do not subscribe to email communications, so any emails received at these addresses are spam.

Optionally, you can choose to have the Sender Score tile report on these metrics:

• FBL complaint rates: Some mailbox providers offer a feedback loop (FBL) service for senders. When a subscriber complains about an email, the mailbox provider forwards that email back to the sender so they can research the nature of the request to reduce the incidence of complaints. Any publicly available feedback loop sources (for example, AOL) may be directed to Return Path and the data is reported through this feature.
  
  

• Microsoft SNDS complaint rates: These complaints are data from Microsoft's Sending Network Data Services (SNDS) system. Using both spam trap hits made up of once active Hotmail addresses and complaint counts calculated using complaint rate and volume metrics provided in these SNDS reports, SNDS data gives you additional insight into factors contributing to your sending reputation.

Why is reputation important?  
Sender reputation is the way mailbox providers measure the trustworthiness of a sender's email. Mailbox providers place a high priority on a sender's reputation when determining inbox or spam folder placement of emails.

Data used to troubleshoot
The data reported in Return Path Platform for these metrics can be used to support troubleshooting of reputation-related issues. Additional data from different sources in Certification can assist in identifying problems such as an overall complaint issue for a client or if there seems to be a more specific complaint issue in one audience, mail stream, IP address, or other source.