Microsoft SNDS and JMRP: monitoring Outlook reputation

Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live addresses make up a large slice of most consumer mailing lists, and Microsoft tells you less about your standing than Gmail does. Two free programs, SNDS and JMRP, are the closest thing you get to a window into how Microsoft's consumer mail service sees your traffic.

What each program does#

Microsoft runs two sender-facing programs for its consumer mail service:

• SNDS (Smart Network Data Services) shows daily data about mail sent from IP addresses you control: volume, how Microsoft's filters judged it, complaint levels and spam trap hits.
• JMRP (Junk Mail Reporting Program) is a feedback loop. When an Outlook.com user marks a message from your IPs as junk, Microsoft can send you a copy of the report so you can stop mailing that person.

Both are keyed on IP addresses, not domains. That is the most important thing to understand about them. If you send through a shared pool at an email provider, you usually cannot enroll those IPs yourself, because you do not control them. The provider may enroll them and act on the data on your behalf. SNDS and JMRP are most useful when you operate dedicated sending IPs.

Microsoft has reorganized its sender support pages more than once, so treat the program details below as a guide and check the current enrollment pages before you rely on any specific field or workflow.

Enrolling in SNDS#

Enrollment works roughly like this:

1. Sign in to the SNDS portal with a Microsoft account.
2. Request access for an IP address or range, written as a single address or CIDR block.
3. Microsoft sends an authorization email to an address associated with that IP, typically one derived from the WHOIS record for the network or from role addresses such as postmaster@ or abuse@ at the domain in the IP's reverse DNS.
4. Click the link in that message to confirm control.

The authorization step is where most people get stuck. If your hosting provider owns the WHOIS record and your PTR record points to their domain, the confirmation goes to them, not you. Before requesting access, make sure:

• The sending IP has a PTR record under a domain you control, such as mail1.example.com.
• [email protected] and [email protected] exist and are monitored.
• The PTR name resolves back to the same IP (forward-confirmed reverse DNS).

Reading SNDS data#

SNDS shows one row per IP per day. The fields you will look at most:

The filter colors#

The filter result is shown as green, yellow or red. As commonly described, green means the filter judged only a small share of the IP's mail as spam, red means it judged most of it as spam, and yellow covers the range in between. Microsoft's own descriptions of the exact thresholds have varied, so read the colors as a trend indicator rather than a precise score.

• Green, steady: your traffic from that IP looks healthy to Microsoft.
• Yellow, occasionally: usually a campaign or segment that performed poorly. Look at what went out that day.
• Yellow or red, sustained: a structural problem with list quality, content, authentication or volume patterns.

Complaint rate and trap hits#

A rising complaint rate is the clearest signal that recipients do not want what you are sending. Any trap hits deserve investigation. A single hit can come from an old address in a long-lived list; a pattern of hits means a list source or acquisition practice is bad.

Correlate SNDS dates with your own send logs. SNDS does not tell you which campaign caused a problem, but your logs do.

JMRP report arrives
  -> parse ARF, extract original message
  -> find subscriber token
  -> suppress that recipient for the relevant mail stream
  -> record complaint against campaign and list source