How to Check IP Reputation: 5 Free Email Score Tools
Reading Time: 5 minutes If you’re concerned about your email deliverability, monitoring your IP reputation is critical. There are some easy and free ways to check IP reputation and then improve it.
If you want your emails to be delivered, you’ll need to follow the rules. All types of emails are dependent on a healthy domain name and IP (Internet Protocol, the network address of your site). These include transactional, promotional, cold outreach, and operational emails.
While it’s worth checking your current IP score, it will fail without email authentication. Email authentication includes a set of basic and free steps to boost your domain/IP reputation.
While these tools to check IP reputation will work for any IP or domain, they are primarily meant for domains you control. While the IP address reputation of your ESP (Email Service Provider) affects your email deliverability, there isn’t much that you can do to improve that.
Five Free Tools to Check IP Reputation
Here are five free tools to check your IP reputation for email deliverability.
1. Google Postmaster Tools
Google Postmaster Tools will give you a good idea about your IP reputation within the Gmail environment. It ranks your domains by compliance status and spam.
It is easy to use. Just add your domains and monitor them over time. I recommend adding every domain that you send emails from/to so you can catch problems quickly.
2. BrightCloud’s IP Lookup
BrightCloud is probably the simplest IP check tool in the list. You don’t need an account; the results are a simple one-pager.
You’ll get a web reputation score out of 100. You’ll want to score 80 and up.
You’ll also get a ranking for these these levels.
- No infections past 12 months
- Popularity Level
- Domain age, established or not established
3. Sender Score
Sender Score is a powerful tool for ranking your sender’s reputation. This is their flagship calculator.
They also have blocklist lookups, list quality checks, bounce lookups, deliverability benchmarks, and email revenue calculators.
4. Talos Intelligence by Cisco
Talos Intelligence tool gives a full analysis of IP health and reputation. For your IP score, check the Web Reputation report.
This powerful, broad tool covers web reputation, content categorization, sender IP reputation, sender domain reputation, file reputation, and IPS/IDS.
5. Multirbl
Multirbl specializes in checking your mail IP for known blacklists. These blacklists are also known as blocklists or anti-spam lists.
The tool runs fast and gives a range of listed results. They range from not lists (green is good) to blacklisted, brownlisted, yellowlisted, whitelisted, neutrallisted, and failed.
This tool would be good to use when auditing a domain before purchase. Or when auditing the email setup for a client to determine why deliverability is low.
More About Checking Email IP Reputation
Do I need all of these tools or just one? If you’re having problems with email deliverability, you should run your IP/domain through all of them. Make a note of the deficiencies and work on them. Over time, you’ll see which tool best suits your use case.
What if my IP trust score doesn’t show? If you just purchased a domain name or recently configured it to send/receive email, you won’t have many (any) results.
To warm up your email, you can begin to use it with close contacts, getting responses and interactions. These send good signals and build your IP reputation. Within a few weeks, you should start gaining traction and generating good data.
How often should you check your IP reputation? I recommend four different times to check your IP trust score.
- Before beginning to send emails with an existing domain.
- Before purchasing a domain that was used before. If it was used for spamming or other questionable activities, it’s possible that it is permanently blacklisted and will never be suitable as an email domain.
- If your deliverability is decreasing.
- Annually. Things change, and staff members come and go. It’s a good idea to check the health of your email IP at least once a year.
How to improve your IP reputation. This isn’t easy, especially if you are beginning to show up on blacklists. The only way that your reputation is decreasing is if someone in your organization is acting like a spammer or phisher. Or if your technical setup is misconfigured.
Email deliverability is a critical factor in content marketing. And email IP health is also an indicator of the overall domain health, a factor in technical SEO.
Your Turn
Have a question about checking email IP reputation or improving the IP trust score? Ask your question below and I’ll do my best to help.
