Sending Reputation

Mailbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook decide where your email lands, in the inbox, in spam or nowhere, largely on your sending reputation. Mumara ONE watches the signals that shape it and steps in automatically when they go wrong, before the mailbox providers do.

This page explains what's watched, what Mumara ONE can do on its own, what you'll see when it does, and how to keep your reputation healthy.

Why reputation matters

Mailbox providers judge every sender by a few signals:

• Bounces. Mail to addresses that don't exist suggests an old, bought or badly collected list.
• Complaints. A recipient clicking Report spam is the strongest negative signal there is. Even a small complaint rate harms delivery.
• Blocklists. Public lists of IPs and domains seen sending spam. Many receiving servers refuse mail from anything listed.
• Engagement. Opens, replies and messages moved out of spam help. Mail that's ignored or deleted unread doesn't.

Reputation is tied to your sending domains and to the IPs your mail leaves from. On shared infrastructure, other customers send from the same IPs, so one sender with a bad list can hurt everyone's delivery. That's why Mumara ONE checks every account automatically and acts quickly. See Key Concepts for shared and dedicated infrastructure.

What Mumara ONE watches

What	What's checked	What Mumara ONE can do
Your account	Bounce and complaint rates across everything you send, marketing and transactional: over your whole history, this month, and day by day	Email you about each incident, and suspend the account
Contact lists	How many of each list's contacts have hard bounced or complained, compared with the size of the list	Block the list
Broadcasts	The bounce rate of a broadcast while it's sending	Stop the broadcast
Sending domains	Blocklists, plus the daily check of the domain's DNS records	Suspend the domain, or switch off a record that keeps failing
Dedicated IPs	Blocklists and the IP's IP Health score	Take the IP out of sending

A few things to know about how the checks work:

• Account and list checks run once a day. A broadcast is checked while it sends.
• There has to be enough to judge. Your account isn't assessed until you've sent a meaningful volume, so a few bounces from your first test sends won't count against you.
• New accounts get a closer look. Some checks apply only during an account's first weeks, when a bad list does the most damage.
• The limits are set by Mumara in line with what the large mailbox providers expect from bulk senders, and they aren't shown in the app. Mumara's Acceptable Use Policy describes the bounce and complaint levels to stay well below.

Account incidents

A day on which your account's bounce rate or complaint rate for the previous 24 hours is over the limit counts as an incident. For each one you get an email, with a subject such as:

• Important Account Health Notification - High Bounce Rate Alert
• Important Account Health Notification - High Spam Rate Alert

The email gives the incident number, how many incidents are allowed, the day's numbers and the limit that was crossed. Incidents are counted over a rolling period, and if you reach the allowed number, the account is suspended.

Treat the first incident email as a call to act: stop what you were sending, find the list it went to and clean it before you send again.

Your overall and monthly rates are checked too. If either crosses its limit, Mumara ONE can warn you or suspend the account without a run of incidents first.

Contact lists

Each list is checked as a whole: how many of its contacts have hard bounced, and how many have complained, compared with the size of the list. A list that goes over the limit is blocked. A list usually gets there because it's old or wasn't collected with permission, and blocking it early stops it from harming your other lists and your account.

Broadcasts

When a broadcast is sending and enough of it has gone out to judge, Mumara ONE checks its bounce rate. If it's too high, the broadcast is stopped and the rest isn't sent. A high bounce rate on a single send almost always means the list is out of date.

Sending domains

Mumara ONE re-checks the DNS records of your sending domains every day, as described in Sending Domains. A domain that appears on a domain blocklist can be suspended: it can't be used for sending until the problem is resolved, and its tracking domain is switched off.

Dedicated IPs

Every Dedicated IP has an IP Health score, shown under Setup → Dedicated IPs, and is checked continuously against the major blocklists. If an IP is listed, Mumara's team is alerted, and the IP can be taken out of sending until it's delisted. The other IPs in its pool carry on sending. See Dedicated IPs.

The shared IPs every account starts on are looked after by Mumara. There's nothing for you to check.

What you'll see

What happened	Where you see it	Email and notification
Account incident	Your inbox and Notifications in the top bar	Important Account Health Notification - High Bounce Rate Alert or High Spam Rate Alert
List blocked	Lists → Contact Lists: the list shows a Blocked badge instead of its actions menu, and campaigns and triggers skip its contacts	Your contact list … has been blocked
Broadcast stopped	Campaigns → Scheduled Campaigns: the status reads Stopped By Policy. Click the warning icon next to the name for the explanation.	Your campaign has reached the bounce limit
Sending domain suspended	Setup → Sending Domains: the domain shows Suspended instead of its actions menu	Your domain … is blacklisted
Dedicated IP taken out of sending	Setup → Dedicated IPs: the IP's Status switch is off	A notice from Mumara ONE
Account suspended	Signing in shows "Your account was suspended."	Your account has been suspended!

When an account is suspended:

• running campaigns are paused and nothing new is sent
• Bridges stop accepting mail from your application
• tracking links in email you've already sent, on your tracking domains, stop working until the suspension is lifted

Notifications

Reputation notices appear under Notifications in the top bar and are emailed to you. Incident and suspension notices are always emailed, even if you switch them off under Preferences. See Notification Preferences for the full list.

How actions are lifted

Action	How it's lifted
Incident email	There's nothing to lift. Incidents drop out of the count as days pass without new ones.
Blocked list	Remove the hard-bounced and complaining contacts; you can still find the list's contacts under Contacts → View/Search Contacts. The block can be lifted automatically once the list is back under the limit. If it stays blocked, contact support.
Stopped broadcast	Clean the list it was sent to, then contact support. A stopped broadcast isn't resumed automatically.
Suspended sending domain	Lifted once the domain is off the blocklist. If it stays suspended, contact support.
Dedicated IP out of sending	Put back into sending once the IP is delisted. If it doesn't come back, contact support.
Suspended account	Contact Mumara support with a plan for fixing the cause, such as cleaning or retiring the lists involved. An account suspension isn't lifted automatically.

The Health gauge

The Health gauge on the Dashboard sums up your sending reputation as a score from 0 to 100. It's calculated from your bounce and spam-complaint rates over everything you've sent, marketing and transactional:

• Bounces lower the score.
• Complaints lower it much more sharply. A complaint rate that looks tiny next to your bounce rate can cost more points.

Score	Grade
80–100	High Performing
60–80	Sustainable
40–60	Foundational
20–40	Volatile
0–20	Unsustainable

Keep in mind:

• It moves slowly. The score covers your whole sending history, so one bad campaign can pull it down for a long time, and it recovers as you send more clean mail.
• It's a guide, not a trigger. The automatic actions on this page come from the checks described above, not from the gauge. A falling score is your early warning that those checks may soon act.

The postmaster page

Every IP address Mumara ONE sends from, shared or dedicated, answers web requests with a redirect to Mumara's public postmaster page at www.mumara.com/postmaster. Mailbox providers and blocklist operators ask for this: when they look up a sending IP, they want to see who is responsible for its mail and how to reach them.

What this means for you:

• Mumara is named as the operator of every sending IP, including your Dedicated IPs. This is also true if you've given a Dedicated IP your own reverse DNS hostname: opening that hostname in a browser leads to the same page. See IP Settings.
• Abuse reports come to Mumara. The page explains how to report spam, and reports go to Mumara's abuse team, not to you. The team traces each report to the sending account, stops mail to the reported address and may ask you where and when that person gave consent. If consent can't be shown, sending stops.
• Providers ask Mumara to lift blocks. If a mailbox provider blocks one of your Dedicated IPs, contact Mumara support rather than the provider. Mumara's postmaster team handles reset requests and will want to know what you've changed.

Keep your reputation healthy

Keep your lists clean

• Mail only people who asked to hear from you. Never use bought, rented or scraped lists. They're full of dead addresses and spam traps, and they're against the Acceptable Use Policy.
• Confirm new sign-ups. Double opt-in keeps mistyped and fake addresses off your lists. See Compliance.
• Let bounces and complaints do their job. Mumara ONE stops mailing hard-bounced and complaining contacts for you. Don't re-import them from an old spreadsheet. See Bounces and Complaints.
• Retire contacts who never engage. People who haven't opened or clicked for many months are the most likely to complain, and some of their addresses turn into spam traps.
• Clean before you revive. A list you haven't mailed for a long time will bounce heavily. Send to its most recent contacts first, and remove what bounces before sending to the rest.

Warm up new Dedicated IPs

A new IP has no history, and mailbox providers distrust large volumes from an IP they don't know. Mumara ONE warms up new Dedicated IPs for you, starting at conservative rates. Help it by sending steadily and starting with your most engaged contacts. See Warm-up.

Keep marketing and transactional mail apart

Newsletters draw more complaints than receipts and password resets do. With separate Dedicated Pools for each, a problem with a campaign never delays the email your customers are waiting for. On shared infrastructure, you can still keep their domain reputations apart by sending marketing from a separate sending domain, such as news.example.com.

Authenticate every sending domain

Publish the DKIM, tracking and bounce records for every sending domain, and add a DMARC record. Authenticated mail is easier for providers to trust and harder for others to impersonate. See Sending Domains.

Watch your numbers

• The Health gauge and the Sending Overview on the Dashboard show the trend.
• Analytics → Bounce and Analytics → Complaints show every bounce and complaint, with the reason.
• Broadcast Stats shows how each campaign did, so you can tell which list or content caused a spike.

Related pages

• Bounces and Complaints: how Mumara ONE handles bounces, complaints and suppression for you
• Compliance: consent, unsubscribes and the rules that apply to commercial email
• Dedicated IPs: warm-up and IP reputation monitoring
• Notification Preferences: which notices are emailed to you