Email correspondence is one of the most commonly used methods of communication with more than 294 billion emails sent per day worldwide in 2010. That means that there are over 2.8 million emails sent every second and around 90 trillion email's sent per year. It's also worth mentioning that approximately 90% of the millions of email messages sent are spam or viruses. The more important statistic however; one that eclipses that of how many messages are sent is how many messages are actually received and delivered to your inbox.
In our last post, we discussed some best practices that will ensure a higher inbox delivery for your email messages and increase your email sender reputation. Today, let's further the discussion by mentioning some online resources that will help you determine what your actual reputation and risk level are. Your sender score works much like a credit score. It's an indication of the trustworthiness of an email source.
Your reputation score is provided by taking into consideration data that is provided by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and other email receivers to determine whether to accept or reject email. In order for you to check your reputation score, you will first need to know how to locate your email IP address. Let's take a look at how this is done in the most common email services out there.
The first step is to have someone using the same email domain (you@dealershipname.com) as you send you an email. Once you've done that, then you can move one to see how to find the IP address using some of the most common email services out there.
1. Open a message
2. On the View menu, click Options
3. Header information appears under Delivery Options in the Internet Headers box.
4. To determine the IP address of the sender, you have to look to the Received: headers. They are usually in the following format:
Sample: Received: from 088156106043.stk.vectranet.pl [88.156.106.205] by web41013.mail.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:44:26 -0700 This means the message was sent from the IP address 88.156.106.205
1. Log into Gmail
2. Open a message
3. To display email headers, click on the inverted triangle next to Reply. Select Show Original.
4. Look for Received: from followed by the IP address between the square brackets [ ].
5. If you find more that one Received: from patterns, select the last one.
1. Log into Yahoo! Mail
2. Click on Inbox
3. Click on the Subject of the email and right-click
4. From the menu select View Full Headers
5. Look for Received: from followed by the IP address between the square brackets [ ].
1. Log into Hotmail/Windows Live
2. Click on Inbox
3. Under the column that says “Sort By”, find the email that you want to track and right-click on it.
4. Click on View message source. 5. If you find a header with X-Originating-IP: followed by an IP address, that is the sender's IP address Now that we've got the IP address, it's time to check out our sender reputation.
Go to www.senderscore.org. This is a free service offered by Return Path.
They rate your IP address based on data that is received from ISPs and other sources and give you an overall Sender Score. All you need to do is sign up for a free account and you're on your way.
Once you are logged in, you simply enter the IP address and SenderScore will return information that has been pulled from Internet Service Providers and other data resources worldwide.
You will be able to get an idea of what percentage of your emails are being delivered to the inbox and if there are any flags on your emails as being spam like.
This is a valuable tool for dealers to measure whether or not their email correspondence is being received as anticipated. By improving the quality of the emails you send and measuring your overall email reputation, you are well on your way to making sure that the emails you send are being received as expected or are hitting the spam box.