How SuretyMail Can Help with Your Sender Reputation Data (SRD)

Sender Reputation Data (SRD) can refer either to the data related to your email sending reputation generally, or to Microsoft’s Windows Live Sender Reputation Data (WSRD or WLSRD) program. In either case our SuretyMail email reputation certification can help!

In fact, generally speaking, if your overall sender reputation is good, and if you are doing all of the right things to make sure that is so, then that will also help you with your Microsoft SRD.

Here’s the thing – whether you are having your email reputation certified or not, you already have an email sender reputation. Everybody has an email sending reputation, the questions are a) how good is your email sender reputation, and b) what are you doing to improve it and keep a good email reputation?

Many, many factors go into your general email sending reputation, across the Internet, including things such as your email authentication, your open rates, your click-through rate, and your overall MR (magnitude of responsiveness) rate. And all of these things are influenced by factors over which you, the email sender, have control. (That is one of the things that we do for our SuretyMail email reputation certification clients – we help them to make sure that they are doing everything they can on their end to keep their email reputation high.)

Microsoft’s Windows Live Sender Reputation Data (WSRD) is Microsoft’s own internal program to supplement and inform their Hotmail Smart Screen spam filtering system. It is unique in that instead of it passively watching for users to hit “this is spam”, the program instead sends email to users asking whether it is junk or not, and those users vote on whether your email is spam! Here’s how it works:

For those users who participate in the WSRD program, Microsoft resends email that Windows Live users have received from you, replacing your ‘from’ address with “pr*********@li**.com”, and replacing the subject of your email with “Junk e-mail classification”. This is how the participants know that it’s an email from the WSRD system on which they need to vote.

In fact, at the top of that email, above your content, it says:

Thanks for helping us fight junk e-mail. Please look at the e-mail message below and tell us whether or not you think its junk e-mail. If you’re reading this message on the Web, it will be removed from your Inbox when you make a selection.

Then the user has to vote on your content, selecting one of the following two options:

Junk e-mail. This is not a message I’d expect to receive. Its junk e-mail and I’d like all similar messages to be blocked from my inbox.

Did you catch that last bit? “…and I’d like all similar messages to be blocked from my inbox.”

You can assume that from now on, your email will never again go to that user’s inbox.

Of course, you will not only not know who that user is, but you won’t even know which of your content was voted off the island. And in fact, these votes aren’t even included in Microsoft’s normal FBL and SNDS data.

But, that said, if you are staying on top of your general sender reputation, you should have little problem (if any) with your Microsoft sender reputation data. So if you aren’t already sender reputation certified with us, check us out today!