Many questions are currently being asked about monitoring your email reputation and how to go about this.

Here is a short list of way you can keep track on your own:

  • Feedback loops – A service offered by a number of ISPs to notify a sender when users are reporting mail as spam or junk. Most ESPs have these already in place for their clients. Each ISP has threshold that they watch for in regards to excessive complaints from their users. Among the ISPs offering feedback loops are; AOL, Hotmail, Outblaze, Road Runner, United Online, USA.net and Yahoo!
  • Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services – This service provides a summary of how each of your IP addresses looks to Hotmail. Providing details on; number of message attempted, number of message accepted for delivery, Filter Status, and spam traps/complaints.
  • Filtering companies offering reputation sites; Ironport’s Senderbase, Ciphertrust’s Trusted Source service.
  • Companies like Habeas, Lyris, Pivotal Veracity and Return Path offer services that rate reputation with a score and a services that measure how spam-like your messages looks to receivers.
  • Legal compliance monitoring from Lashback helps track Third party affiliates and your own marketing messages for several different legal or contractual violations.

Many ESPs have partnered with one or more of these companies to monitor your mail streams. But if your not using an ESP or wish to monitor these on your own, these tools are available for your use and some are free to use.

The hard part is understanding how to understand all of the data your being shown and taking the proper actions to build or fix your reputation.