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Sender health and reputation

Your sender reputation decides whether your email reaches the inbox at all. SmartMailing gives you a live read on it and, when something goes wrong, steps in automatically to protect your domain. The overview lives on the Reports page, on the Overview tab.

The sender health score​

The hero of the overview is a composite sender health score from 0 to 100, shown as a gauge with a plain-language verdict of where you stand. Next to it, a status pill shows whether sending is currently active, paused, or suspended for the brand.

The score is built from the signals mailbox providers actually judge you on, listed under the gauge with a green, amber, or red dot each:

  • Spam complaints: the heaviest factor by far. Even a tiny complaint rate hurts; each row shows the safe limit to stay under.
  • Hard bounces: sending to addresses that do not exist tells providers your list is stale or scraped.
  • Email authentication (DMARC): how much of your mail fully authenticates. If you have no DMARC data yet, this row links you to DMARC monitoring to set it up.
  • Audience engagement: a low open rate drags the score, since providers treat ignored mail as unwanted mail.

Rates need volume to mean anything. Until you have sent around 100 emails in the window, the rows show "building data" and the verdict tells you nothing is concerning so far. If sending is paused or suspended, the score is capped at a low value regardless of your rates, because a halted brand is by definition not in good standing.

Bounce and complaint rates​

The Performance section shows your headline rates for the selected window, including Bounce rate and Complaint rate, each with the change versus the previous period. The Trend chart has a Problems view that plots bounces and complaints over time, so you can spot a bad list import or a problem campaign the day it happens.

Keep both rates as close to zero as you can:

  • Bounces come from stale or purchased lists. Double opt-in, regular list cleaning, and never importing addresses without consent keep them down.
  • Complaints come from people who did not expect your email. Clear sender names, honest subject lines, and an easy unsubscribe keep them down.

Automatic protection​

SmartMailing continuously monitors every brand's bounce and complaint rates, in near real time as delivery events come in and on a regular schedule in the background. The limits it enforces are stricter than what mailbox providers and the underlying infrastructure tolerate, so problems are caught before they damage your domain's reputation:

  • When a rate climbs into warning territory, SmartMailing logs the event and notifies you.
  • When a rate crosses the safe limit, SmartMailing pauses sending on the affected stream. Because promotional and transactional streams are isolated, a paused promotional stream does not stop your transactional email.

This can feel abrupt, but it is the feature working as intended: a short pause is vastly cheaper than a burned domain, which can take months to recover.

The reputation timeline​

The Reputation timeline section records every time SmartMailing acted to protect your sending reputation: warnings, pauses, suspensions, and recoveries, each with the metric that triggered it, the limit involved, and when it happened. A clean record shows "No deliverability incidents."

If your brand is paused, fix the underlying cause first: clean the list segment that bounced, or stop the content that drew complaints. If your brand is suspended, contact support to review and restore sending.

tip

Check the overview after every large campaign. The score, the Problems trend, and the timeline together tell you within a day whether a send helped or hurt your reputation.