Domain reputation

Every domain carries a reputation — a score from 0 to 100 that summarises how the mail you send from it is being received. You will find it on the domain page in the dashboard and in the weekly usage email. A new domain starts at the top of the scale.

The score is recalculated automatically, several times an hour, for verified domains only. There is nothing to trigger by hand.

What is measured

The score is built from your domain's own delivery history. These are the things that move it, in order of how much they matter:

• Successful delivery — the share of your mail that the receiving server accepted. This carries the most weight by a wide margin.
• Bounces — mail rejected outright. The second-largest factor, and the one most senders can act on fastest.
• Opens — recorded opens count in your favour and lift the score (see below).
• Spam complaints — a smaller factor by weight, but the penalty is disproportionate: even a modest complaint rate wipes out its whole contribution.
• Unsubscribes — the smallest factor, though a high rate still costs you.

Only mail that has reached a final state counts — delivered, or permanently failed. Messages still queued or waiting on a retry are not counted either way.

The DMARC gate

Separately from everything above, DMARC results put a hard ceiling on the score. Once we have collected enough DMARC reports for mail sent from your domain, a poor pass rate caps the score no matter how good your delivery numbers are — and the worse the pass rate, the lower the ceiling.

This is the one part of the score that applies even to low-volume domains that are otherwise not scored. If your reputation is stuck below what your delivery deserves, DMARC alignment is the first thing to check.

Reading the reports yourself

Every domain's _dmarc record points its rua at us, so mailbox providers send their aggregate reports here — and you can now read them. The summary shows, for a window you choose:

• who reported — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the rest. This is coverage, not health: one reporter is one provider's view of your mail, and nobody reporting means you are not being measured at all.
• your mail — everything sent through us, with the DKIM and SPF alignment rates that decide the ceiling above.
• everything else — mail claiming to be from your domain that did not leave our servers, broken out per source address. That is usually your other providers and your recipients' forwarders, not an attack; failures here never affect your score, because somebody spoofing you is not your misconfiguration. It is shown because you are the only person who can tell which is which.
• the gate itself — the pass rate reputation is actually using and the ceiling in force, straight from the same calculation, so the page cannot disagree with your score.

A domain with no reports reads as unmeasured, never as healthy. If reports stop arriving, the usual reason is that the _dmarc record was edited.

Low-volume domains are not scored

If you send very little, there is not enough evidence to judge you and the score stays at the top of the scale. The bar is lower for domains that mostly send transactional mail than for those sending bulk campaigns. The DMARC ceiling above can still apply.

A brand-new domain sending far above its ramp

In its first week a domain has no delivery history worth scoring — nothing has bounced yet and nothing has been opened yet — so a domain that starts by sending many times its daily sending cap has its score capped rather than scored: the further above the cap, the lower the ceiling, and a domain far enough above it lands below the warning line and gets the warning email.

This is a ceiling, not a block — it never reaches the level at which sending is refused, and it lifts as the domain builds a real history. If you are bringing an existing list to a new domain, ramp into it over a few days rather than sending all of it on day one.

The measuring window adapts to your volume

The more you send, the shorter the period we score you over: a busy domain is judged on its recent activity, while a quiet one is judged on weeks of history. A low-volume sender therefore carries a bad patch for much longer than a high-volume one.

How the number moves

The score is slow by design. It is smoothed over the recent past, so a single bad hour will not move it, and it climbs back gradually rather than jumping.

In practice: after you fix the underlying problem, expect a delay of several hours before the score starts moving at all, then a steady climb. If you are a low-volume sender, the bad window itself keeps counting against you for far longer — weeks, not hours.

What happens at each level

Warning

If the score drops below a healthy level, we email the domain's users. The warning line is stricter on free plans than on paid ones. Nothing else changes — your sending is unaffected.

Sending refused

If the score falls to a critical level, new mail is refused. This is the only point at which reputation stops anything, and the critical level is the same on every plan, including free — the warning above is a warning only, not a sending limit.

Over SMTP the refusal happens at authentication, with the message Bad domain reputation. Over the HTTP API the request is rejected with HTTP 400:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "auth": {
        "non_field_errors": ["Domain reputation is critical"]
    }
}

Open tracking affects the score

Opens count in your favour, so a domain with no recorded opens cannot reach the top of the scale even with flawless delivery, zero bounces and zero complaints — it settles well short of a perfect score.

Turning open tracking off — or sending to recipients whose mail clients block images — therefore holds your score down, uncomfortably close to the warning line on a free plan. Leaving open tracking enabled is the way to avoid this.

How to improve it

Ordered by how much each one actually moves the number:

1. Stop bounces. Clean your list — invalid addresses are the fastest way to lose points.
2. Make sure your mail is accepted at all. Delivery is the largest single factor.
3. Earn opens. This is the biggest swing available to a domain that is otherwise healthy.
4. Keep complaints and unsubscribes low.
5. Fix DMARC alignment if the ceiling is what is holding you down.

Sending a healthy volume of good mail also shortens the measuring window, so recovery gets faster.

Reputation is not the only thing that can stop a domain: content and volume checks can block one outright, and how much it may send per day is a separate mechanism again. See sending limits and anti-abuse.