What Is Sender Score?
Sender Score is a reputation rating from 0 to 100, produced by Validity (formerly Return Path), that estimates the health of a sending IP address based on 30 days of activity. A higher score signals a more trusted sender; scores below 70 often correlate with deliverability problems.
Think of Sender Score as a credit score for your sending IP. It aggregates metrics like complaint rates, spam-trap hits, bounce rates, blacklist appearances, and volume consistency into a single percentile-style number benchmarked against other senders.
A score above 90 is generally excellent, 80–90 is good, 70–80 is a warning zone, and below 70 signals reputation issues that likely correlate with spam-foldering or blocks. Because it is IP-based, Sender Score is most meaningful for senders on dedicated IPs; shared-IP senders should weight domain reputation more heavily.
Sender Score is a useful third-party gauge, but it is one input among many. Providers use their own internal reputation systems, so a good Sender Score does not guarantee inbox placement — you still need to measure where mail actually lands.
MailPilot focuses on the signals you can directly influence — engagement and placement — and shows real inbox results rather than relying on a single third-party score.
Measure real placement, not just a score →