Accepted Rate

The accepted number of emails reported by ISPs and email providers is commonly referred to as an Accepted Rate. Generally, the scores are based on a scale beginning with 0 and ending with 100- 100 being a perfect score. These are compiled by a variety of ISPs and companies in the business of gathering this data, who in turn share this aggregated and non-personal data with other entities who provide white- and blacklist data. An “accepted” e-mail would be any that are not rejected by a server, which includes those delivered to junk or spam folders or any message that doesn’t generate a bounce reply.

Most of this data is gathered and disseminated on a rolling 30-day cycle and reflects averages within those cycles. In many cases there is also other data and metrics that are gathered at the same times, correlated and segregated to scoring and determine other factors for reference and review for those who use the various reporting data for other types of marketing analysis.

Over the years, the methods in which data is gathered has become increasingly sophisticated and are highly guarded proprietary information. However, the thousands of lines of code and numbers are gathered, of which, the basic categories consist of:

• Complaints: This is simply the number of complaints reported from an IP address and compared to all other IP addresses observed by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
• Volume: Volume or number of emails sent is not really a factor in any rating, yet it is still considered an important factor of the overall reputation algorithm.
• External Reputation: Is an indicator of and a comparison score based on all other IP addresses and the numbers contained in both blacklists and whitelists.
• Rejected: This is the number of bounce messages due to spam filtering, an invalid address, blacklisting, user reports, etc. and again is compared to all other IP addresses.