How do hygiene issues affect sender reputation?
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Your sender reputation is not one number. It is two: your IP reputation and your domain reputation. Hygiene issues weaken both, but domain reputation is now the one that matters most.
IP reputation reflects the history of the server that sends your mail. Consistent hard bounces, spam complaints, and spam trap hits from a given IP degrade its reputation over time. If you send via a shared IP, other senders on that IP can affect your reputation too. This is one reason high-volume senders use dedicated IPs.
Domain reputation is tied to your From address and sending domain. It has become the primary trust signal at Gmail, Yahoo, and other major providers because it is harder to game than IP reputation. If your domain consistently sends to spam traps, generates high complaint rates, or has poor engagement signals, providers associate that pattern with your domain. Moving to a new sending IP does not reset it.
The practical implication: if you clean your list and your reputation is already degraded, improvement takes time. It is not instantaneous. Providers need to see consistent good behavior over weeks or months before they adjust their trust score for your domain. There is no shortcut.
What helps reputation recover fastest: stop sending to bad addresses immediately, suppress your lowest-engagement segments, authenticate properly with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and focus sends on your most engaged subscribers until trust scores improve. Check your domain reputation in Google Postmaster Tools and run a free Blocklist Check to see where things stand.
For the full picture on what causes reputation to degrade in the first place, what ISPs detect and how covers the signals providers monitor.
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