Prerequisites
- Email Analytics and Sender Reputation — How reputation is judged
Sender Reputation Thresholds
What counts as healthy, what counts as at risk, and where the lines are.
The reputation banner is derived from two figures only: your bounce rate and your spam complaint rate. Each is placed in a band, and the overall verdict is always the worse of the two — a spotless bounce rate will not offset a complaint problem.
The same bands colour the Bounce Rate and Spam Rate cards, so you can see which of the two is responsible.
The bands
| Metric | Healthy | Needs attention | At risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bounce rate | Under 2% | 2% to 5% | Above 5% |
| Spam complaint rate | Under 0.1% | 0.1% to 0.5% | Above 0.5% |
Info: The spam thresholds are far tighter than the bounce ones, and that is not a mistake. One complaint in a thousand messages is already outside the healthy band. Complaints are the strongest negative signal an inbox provider has.
The four banner states
Sender reputation is healthy
— Both rates are inside the healthy band. The banner repeats both figures so you can see the margin you have.
Sender reputation needs attention
— At least one rate has entered the middle band. Nothing is blocked, but the trend matters: review list hygiene now rather than after the next large send.
Sender reputation at risk
— At least one rate is above the safe threshold. Clean your lists and pause risky sends. Continuing at this level puts delivery of all your email at stake, not just the campaign that caused it.
Not enough data yet
— Nothing was sent in the selected period, so there is no verdict. Widen the period or send some email. This state is deliberately neutral rather than green — it is an absence of information, not a clean bill of health.
What to do at each level
| Level | Action |
|---|---|
| Healthy | Nothing. Check again after any unusually large or unusually new audience send. |
| Needs attention — bounces | Look at the bounce breakdown. A rise in hard bounces points at list quality: stop mailing unverified imports and let suppressions do their job rather than re-adding addresses. |
| Needs attention — complaints | Look at what you sent and to whom. Complaints usually mean relevance or frequency, not spam in the legal sense. Narrow the audience and reduce cadence before sending again. |
| At risk | Pause non-essential sending. Work through the opt-out list, remove the audiences that produced the bounces or complaints, and let the rate recover over a few weeks of smaller, well-targeted sends. |
Warning: Reputation recovers slowly and falls quickly. A single send to a stale list can move you into the at-risk band for weeks, and there is no way to reset it — only to send well, to engaged recipients, until the rates come down.
