How can I determine if third-party links in email affect deliverability?

Email marketer from StackExchange recommends checking if the third-party domains are on any email blacklists (e.g., Spamhaus). Being blacklisted can significantly impact your email deliverability.

Marketer from Email Geeks suggests using tools like IBM's X-Force, Cisco's Talos, or VirusTotal to check domains for reputational problems or malware hosting. Also recommends considering link shortening and shared content domains as potentially having poor reputation.

Email marketer from Neil Patel's website explains that UTM parameters can be used to track the performance of links in emails, including those from third parties, allowing you to identify if specific links are negatively impacting your overall email performance.

Email marketer from Litmus advises wrapping third-party links using your own domain's tracking links. This allows you to control the reputation of the links and isolate any deliverability issues caused by the third party.

Marketer from Email Geeks notes that link trackers need to be branded to your domain.

Marketer from Email Geeks notes that all senders should strive to only be linking to their own domain in messages to reduces risks.

Email marketer from SuperOffice explains that using a dedicated IP address for sending emails gives you more control over your sender reputation. This allows you to isolate the impact of third-party links more effectively.

Email marketer from Mailgun's documentation suggests avoiding using generic link shorteners, especially for important links, as they can be associated with spam and negatively affect deliverability. Suggests if they are used, brand them.

Email marketer from SendPulse shares that analyzing the click-through rates (CTR) of emails with and without third-party links can provide insights. A significant drop in CTR when including specific third-party links suggests they may be harming deliverability.

Marketer from Email Geeks suggests making tests with and without the third-party links and see if there's a noticeable difference, then the links may be the cause of the problem.

Marketer from Email Geeks empirically, it certainly seems plausible that the domain of tracking links in a URL can have an impact on detection services, which can have a downstream impact on deliverability.

Email marketer from HubSpot advises using a reputable Email Service Provider (ESP) that monitors and manages sender reputation. They often have systems to detect and prevent deliverability issues caused by problematic links.

Marketer from Email Geeks thinks of reputation as a number of data points, each one influencing reputation either slightly, or not so slightly. A shared ESP link by itself is a slight influence.

Marketer from Email Geeks shares that you can get some hints by checking URI BLs, ad blockers and spamassassin rules, but some rules are just internal to mailbox providers, and potentially temporary.

Email marketer from Reddit suggests A/B testing emails, with one version containing third-party links and the other without. Track inbox placement and engagement metrics to see if third-party links cause a drop in deliverability.

Email marketer from Email on Acid shares pre-deployment testing is an important step to ensure that emails are rendering and displaying correctly across different email clients, but some systems also provide details on whether a link is considered suspect. Using this can help identify if the links affect deliverability.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that reputation is provider-specific. Suggests sending test emails with suspect domains to multiple accounts and observing delivery patterns to gauge reputation with Google specifically.

Expert from Word to the Wise highlights that affiliate links are often a cause for concern as their reputation is often poor due to spammers and fraudulent use. This means that your email may be filtered due to the bad reputation of the domain.

Expert from Email Geeks suggests the short version is: send the email without the third party links and/or wrap them in your own linktracker and see if that changes delivery.

Expert from Email Geeks explains the bigger you are and the more you can own your own infrastructure the less other folks can mess with your deliverability. Even some of the domain blocklists try not to list ESP shared domains because they know that it is a shared tracking domain.

Expert from Email Geeks mentions there is also a volume component as lots of folks have facebook.com, twitter.com or linkedin.com links in their messages, so that actually makes them a bit useless for reputation tracking because they’re in so much good mail and so much bad mail.

Expert from Spam Resource (Laura Atkins) explains that often when people switch ESPs, the new ESP's lack of familiarity with your sending patterns may temporarily affect deliverability until a reputation is established. This could be misconstrued as third-party links impacting deliverability when it's actually the change in sending infrastructure.

Expert from Word to the Wise recommends being cautious using redirect links, as sometimes they are the reason for being added to block lists. These may have the same impact as 3rd party links.

Expert from Email Geeks says the filters are trying to determine whether or not mail is wanted. They use a LOT of different factors to do that and they use machine learning to help them figure it out. Spam filters are constantly in training and being updated to deal with emerging threats.

Documentation from Mailjet explains that consistently monitoring your sending domain's reputation using tools like Google Postmaster Tools can help you detect if third-party links are causing deliverability issues by associating your domain with spam or malicious content.

Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools explains using their dashboard to monitor spam rates associated with your sending domain. An increase in spam complaints after introducing third-party links indicates a potential issue.

Documentation from SparkPost explains using seed lists (test email addresses) to check inbox placement with and without third-party links. This helps determine if these links are causing emails to land in the spam folder.

Documentation from Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) explains that monitoring your IP and domain reputation within the SNDS tool can help you identify if third-party links are causing issues with Microsoft email services. They provide data on complaint rates and other factors.