Dedicated IPs, pros and cons

There’s a whole belief system built around the idea that the best way to get good deliverability is to have your own dedicated IPs. In fact, senders regularly approach me to ask when is the right time for them to get a dedicated IP. They assume all their deliverability problems will disappear if they get a dedicated IP.

Generally they’ve not asked the most important question: should they get a dedicated IP? They don’t consider the benefits and the strengths of being on a shared IPs. One of the biggest issues is we’ve mostly run out of free IPv4 space. Even though some very large networks are consolidating and selling off their IPs to others, IPv4 addresses are still a limited resource. For this reason, among others, Many ESPs, in fact most of them, offer dedicated IPs only to their biggest clients. The majority of their customers are on shared IPs.

The good news is that with modern filters dedicated IPs are not critical for good delivery.

Yes. I said it, and I’ll say it again. Dedicated IPs are not required for good delivery. Reputation, particularly at the webmail providers but increasingly elsewhere, is not solely based on the connecting IP address.

Google, in particular, has made it very clear that they use a matrix of domain and IP reputation. If domains need to be warmed up, that means Google is able to separate out mail from the same IP using different domains. OATH, too, focuses a lot on content and domains, rather than IP addresses. They’ve been able to selectively filter mail, even from dedicated IPs, for years now. Microsoft does put a little more emphasis on IP addresses, but some of the evidence I’ve seen says they look at reputation of the range of IPs not just the connecting one. Even there, a dedicated IP doesn’t buy you that much if your neighbours are not clean.

Of course, nothing about email is one size fits all. There are legitimate reasons to use dedicated IPs. The two big ones are certification and email programs sending more than 1 million emails a day. For certain senders, certification is important and those senders have to have a dedicated IP to get certified. Maintaining a dedicated IP take work. Generally the folks who do it right have a dedicated deliverability person on staff, or are paying a consultant to help them maintain their reputation.

On the other hand folks on shared IPs don’t have to worry about sending enough mail. They don’t have to manage their volume carefully and watch out for spiky traffic. If they’ve chosen a good provider, then the companies they share the IP with are meeting minimum standards and the overall IP reputation is high.

Some of the largest email service providers are built on shared IP addresses: Sendgrid, Mailchimp, and Sparkpost are all primarily shared IP services. Even ESPs that service some of the largest companies, like ExactTarget, have shared ranges for customers.

Over the last 3 or 4 years ISPs approach to IP reputation has changed dramatically. It’s just not as critical as it was a few years ago.

In 2014 we, for various reasons, had to move our mail server to new hardware. At the time we had a full cabinet of servers and a /25 SWIPed to us from our provider. We spun up the new hardware and assigned it an unused IP address in our range. We immediately started having deliverability problems. The problems were despite the IP being next to our old mail server IP, and having the same domain authentication. Rather than try to do anything fancy, we simply moved back to our old IP.

This experience had me slightly concerned as we moved from our colo space early in 2018. We moved our mail server from our own hardware to a dedicated IP address “in the cloud.” But, the transition went smoothly. We’ve had not a whiff of deliverability problems, even though we’re in a range we don’t control.

Today’s reality is that dedicated IPs are often not worth the effort to maintain them. Shared IPs can get even medium size senders the same level of delivery that dedicated IPs can. In fact, some of the messier senders out there actually ask their providers for shared IPs, rather than dedicated IPs because they can get better delivery off the shared IPs.

Don’t worry if you can’t get on a dedicated IP. Just focus on sending mail your recipients want and expect and you’ll reach the inbox just fine.

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Ask Laura: Should I let my ESP give me a shared IP?

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February 2017: The Month In Email

Happy March!

As always, I blogged about best practices with subscriptions, and shared a great example of subscription transparency that I received from The Guardian. I also wrote about what happens to the small pool of people who fail to complete a confirmed opt-in (or double opt-in) subscription process. While there are many reasons that someone might not complete that process, ultimately that person has not given permission to receive email, and marketers need to respect that. I revisited an older post on permission which is still entirely relevant.
Speaking of relevance, I wrote about seed lists, which can be useful, but — like all monitoring tools — should not be treated as infallible, just as part of a larger set of information we use to assess deliverability. Spamtraps are also valuable in that larger set of tools, and I looked at some of the myths and truths about how ISPs use them. I also shared some thoughts from an industry veteran on Gmail filtering.
On the topic of industry veterans, myths and truths, I looked at the “little bit right, little bit wrong” set of opinions in the world of email. It’s interesting to see the kinds of proclamations people make and how those line up against what we see in the world.
We attended M3AAWG, which is always a wonderful opportunity for us to catch up with smart people and look at the larger email ecosystem and how important our work on messaging infrastructure and policy really is. I was glad to see the 2017 Mary Litynski Award go to Mick Moran of Interpol for his tireless work fighting abuse and the exploitation of children online. I also wrote about how people keep wanting to quote ISP representatives on policy issues, and the origin of “Barry” as ISP spokesperson (we should really add “Betty” too…)
Steve took a turn as our guest columnist for “Ask Laura” this month with a terrific post on why ESPs need so many IP addresses. As always, we’d love to get more questions on all things email — please get in touch!

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November 2016: The Month In Email

Happy December! Between #blackfriday, #cybermonday & #givingtuesday, pretty much everyone in the US has just survived a week of email from every brand and organization they’ve ever interacted with. Phew.
TurkeysforBlog
Is this still the best strategy for most senders? Maybe. But it’s always important to be adaptable and continue to evaluate and evolve your strategy as you move through the year.
As always, I continue to think about evolving our own strategies, and how we might best support senders and ESPs. One of the challenges we face when we talk to senders with deliverability questions is that so many of our answers fall into a nebulous “it depends” zone. We’re trying to articulate new ways to explain that to people, and to help them understand that the choices and details they specify at each point of their strategic planning and tactical execution have ramifications on their delivery. While “it depends” is still a correct answer, I’m going to try to avoid it going forward, and instead focus on exploring those choices and details with senders to help them improve deliverability.
In our community of deliverability and anti-abuse professionals, we are — as you’d expect — quite sensitive to unsolicited email that targets our industry. When an email circulates, even what seems like a reasonably well-thought-out email, it occasionally does not land well. Worse still are the various email-related product and service providers who try to legitimize B2B sales messaging as if it is something other than spam.
The takeaway from these discussions for senders is, as always: know your audience. This post about research from Litmus on millennials and spam is a great example of the kinds of things you might consider as you get to know your audience and how they prefer to communicate.
We also had a presidential election this month, one that made much of issues related to email, and it will be interesting to see how the candidates and parties use the email data they collected going forward.
In industry and security news, we saw over a million Google accounts breached by Android malware. We also saw some of the ramifications of a wildcard DNS entry from a domain name expiration — it’s an interesting “how things work” post if you’re curious. In other “how things work” news, we noted some of the recent changes AOL made to its FBL.
I answered an Ask Laura question about dedicated IP pools, and I have a few more queued up as well. As always, we want to know what questions are on the minds of our readers, so please feel free to send them over!

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