I need IP addresses for reputation

Number one of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly.

I need at least one IP address per customer, to handle IP based reputation

Why this is right
While DKIM is gradually moving the main key for reputation tracking to a domain based token, right now the main key that is used to track reputation is the sending IP address.
If you have multiple customers sending mail of different quality using a different sending IP address for each of those customers means that the good customers will not be penalized by the poor behaviour of the bad customers. And, just as importantly, poor customers will not benefit from the behaviour of the good customers. This allows receivers to track sender reputation more accurately, and so delivery just wanted email to their recipients better. That makes everyone happy (other than the bad customers who deserve to be unhappy until they fix their practices).
Why this is wrong
Reputation is tied to sending IP address, but it’s also affected by volume of emails received from that IP address, and the consistency of volume. If a customer is only sending a few hundred emails a week to any given receiver ISP or they’re only mailing monthly then they won’t be able to maintain much of a positive reputation, simply because they’re too small to keep track of or because they mail so infrequently that each time they mail the receiving ISP will have forgotten about their previous mailings. In those cases the sender will be treated much the same as a new sender from a given IP address (neutral, at best, maybe poorly). For those cases a customer is likely to get better delivery rates if their mail is sent through an IP address pool that sends enough email overall to be noticed and tracked by receiving ISPs.
Another reason this is wrong
Reputation is tied to sending IP address, but receiving ISPs aren’t stupid and do recognize attempts to game the system. If you’re an ESP with a mix of good and bad customers then segregating the IP addresses they send from will not completely isolate the reputation of those customers from each other. The bad customers will drag your reputation as an ESP down more than the good customers will pull it up. And as your reputation as an ESP degrades it will pull down the reputation of your good customers much more than it will increase the reputation of your bad or unknown customers.
So segregating senders onto their own IP addresses doesn’t entirely separate their reputation from each other or from their ESP. And if you believe it does, you’re likely to make business decisions based on that misunderstanding that will badly affect your reputation and the delivery rates of your customers. Don’t fall into that trap.

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Technology does not trump policy when it comes to delivery

Recently Ken Magill wrote an article looking at how an ESP was attempting to sell him services based on the ESPs ‘high deliverability rates.’ I commented that Ken was right, and I still think he is.
Ken has a followup article today. In the first part he thanks Matt Blumberg from Return Path for posting a thoughtful blog post on the piece. Matt did have a very thoughtful article, pointing out that the vast majority of things affecting delivery are under the control of the list owner, not under the control of the ESP. As they are both right, I clearly agree with them. I’ve also posted about reputation and delivery regularly.

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TWSD: Lying and Hiding

Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity.
One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or choosefrequency.com or winnernotice.com advertising links at safetyurl.com or childsafeblogging.com or usakidprotect.com.
The spam all claims someone is “searching for…” at their website. The only thing is, the email address is associated with a fake name I gave while testing a website on behalf of a client. I know what website received the data and I know what other data was provided during the signup process. I also know that the privacy policy at the time said that my data would not be shared and that only the company I gave the information to would be sending me email.
Just more proof that privacy policies aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. But that’s not my real issue here.
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It’s not that someone, somewhere gave mylife.com bad data, or that someone typed a name into the mylife.com search engine and the mylife.com database showed that name and my email address were the same. Neither this name or this email address show up in a google search and I can say with certainty that this is a unique address and name combination given to a specific website. Therefore, the subject lines are clearly and demonstrably lies.
The spams are also coming from different domains and advertising links in different domains. The content is identical, the CAN SPAM addresses are identical. While the court may not rule this is deceptive under the rules of CAN SPAM, it certainly is an attempt to avoid domain level spam filters.
Who are mylife.com? Well, their website and the CAN SPAM address on their spam claims they are the company formerly known as reunion.com. I’ve talked about reunion.com here before. They have a history of harvesting addresses from users address books. They were sued for deceptive email practices under California law, but won the case just recently. They seem to think that the court case was permission to send deceptive email and have thus ramped up their deceptive practices.
If you are a legitimate email marketer, there are a couple take home messages here.
1) Spammers send mail with different domains, from different IP addresses, that contain identical content, landing pages and CAN SPAM addresses. Legitimate marketers should not rotate content and sends through different domains or different IP addresses. Pick your domain, pick your IP and stick with it.
1a) Spammers use randomly chosen domain names and cycle through domains frequently. Legitimate marketers must not use unrelated domains in marketing. Use a domain name that relates to your product, your industry or you.
2) Spammers send mail with deceptive subject lines. Legitimate marketers should make sure their subject lines are clear and truthful.
3) Spammers send mail in violation of the privacy policy under which information was collected. Legitimate marketers should be very careful to handle data in accordance with their privacy policies.
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That’s when they call me in, usually asking me if I can go to the ISPs and tell the ISPs that they’re not spammers, they’re doing everything right and will the ISP please stop unfairly blocking them. Usually I will agree to talk to the ISPs, if fixing the underlying problems doesn’t improve their delivery on its own. But before we can talk to the ISPs, we have to try to fix things and at least have some visible changes in behavior to take to them. Once they have externally visible changes, then we can ask the ISPs for a little slack.
With these clients there isn’t just one thing they’ve done to create their bad reputation. Often nothing they’re doing is really evil, it’s just a combination of sorta-bad practices that makes their overall reputation really bad. The struggle is fixing the reputation requires more than one change and no single change is going to necessarily make an immediate improvement on their reputation.
This is a struggle for the customer, because they have to start thinking about email differently. Things have to be done differently from how they’ve always been done. This is a struggle for me because I can’t guarantee if they do this one thing that it will have improved delivery. I can’t guarantee that any one thing will fix their delivery, because ISPs measure and weight dozens of things as part of their delivery making decisions. But what I can guarantee is that if they make the small improvements I recommend then their overall reputation and delivery will improve.
What small improvement have you made today?

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