Validity (email platform)

Validity is a data-quality and email-deliverability company whose products include Sender Score, the Everest deliverability platform, and BriteVerify email verification. It sits close to the infrastructure that decides whether an email reaches the inbox, the spam folder, or nothing at all, which is why marketers encounter its tools and its research when they try to diagnose deliverability problems.

The company expanded its footprint in 2019 by acquiring Return Path, the firm that pioneered much of modern email-deliverability measurement and originally created Sender Score. That acquisition folded Return Path's reputation data and benchmark research into Validity's portfolio, and it is the reason older articles often refer to the same tools under the Return Path name.

Validity's contribution to the measurement picture is deliverability data: inbox-placement rates, sender-reputation patterns, and the complaint and bounce norms that separate a healthy sending program from one heading for the spam folder. That data is drawn from its own deliverability tools and from the mailbox-provider relationships behind them, which is what lets it describe what 'normal' looks like across many senders rather than just your own.

The best-known single number it produces is Sender Score — a 0–100 rating of an IP address's sending reputation, loosely analogous to a credit score, where a higher number signals a stronger reputation and better odds of inbox placement. Validity offers free Sender Score lookups, and the score is widely used as a quick first read on whether a sending reputation needs attention.

Validity publishes email-deliverability benchmark reports periodically. Use its inbox-placement and reputation figures to judge whether your own sending program is healthy, and read them alongside your Sender Score and your mailbox-provider postmaster data rather than in isolation — any single source can miss problems that show up clearly when you triangulate across several.

RGM cites Validity's deliverability research as one email input in its benchmarks compendium. We treat its published figures as an industry reference point, not as a substitute for measuring your own list and sending behaviour, because deliverability depends heavily on your specific domain, audience, and history.

This entry covers Validity the company. The everyday measurement term — whether a metric actually measures what it claims to measure — is a separate idea covered at the validity entry. The two share a name and nothing else, so it is worth being explicit about which one a sentence means.

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