Guidelines for Protecting Your Email Reputation

Determining Your Email Reputation

Several factors determine the email reputation of a domain or IP. The volume of emails sent and the percentage of invalid email addresses used influence your email reputation. Your recipients’ engagement with your emails and the quality of your email content also affect the reputation of the sending IP and your domain.

If you don’t send enough emails, your IP can’t gain sufficient reputation to have good deliverability. Although it’s less common, sending too many emails can tarnish an IP’s reputation. To protect the email reputation of your IP or domain, avoid sending emails including malformed HTML, malicious content, or “spammy” keywords. We recommend that you regularly review your email logs and remove invalid addresses. Cleaning up invalid addresses helps with deliverability and reduces the potential for harm to your email reputation. Finally, make sure that your email has content your recipients need and value. Your recipients’ engagement with your emails matters. Your email reputation improves when they read your emails and suffers when they mark your email as spam.

Sender Reputation Monitoring

Reputational damage to the IPs Salesforce uses to send email can hinder the ability of both Salesforce and its customers to deliver email. We protect the reputation of all email sent by Salesforce by closely monitoring more than 50 major international blocklists. If a customer sends an email that causes one of our domains or IP addresses to be added to one of these blocklists, Salesforce is alerted. We then investigate and work with the blocklist owner to resolve the issue. We also educate customers on proper sending practices so that we can maintain our reputation and improve deliverability.

Get Permission from All Email Recipients

Failing to get explicit permission from your recipients often results in high complaint rates, damaging your email reputation. Have your customers opt in before receiving email from your organization, provide a method for them to opt out, and quickly honor opt-out requests.

Include Your Organization’s Name in the Subject Line

Whenever possible, we recommend that you include the name of your organization in the subject line of your emails. Make sure that the name is familiar to your recipients for quick recognition. Users who don’t recognize the sender often click the "report spam" button without even opening the email.

Bounce Management

No matter how careful you are, some of the emails sent from Salesforce bounce due to stale email addresses, typos in those addresses, or other delivery issues. We recommend that you proactively monitor your bounced emails and remove bad email addresses. Doing so protects your email reputation by reducing the percentage of bad email addresses you send to.

You can use the Bounce Management feature to automatically flag invalid addresses through fields that appear on the contact, lead, and person account list views.

Admins can also request an email log to review the last 30 days of your organization’s email activity. Use these logs to identify bad email addresses and remove them from your org.