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...
Today I was chatting with a potential client who is in the middle of a frustrating warmup at Gmail. They’re doing absolutely the right things, it’s just taking longer than anyone wants. That’s kinda how it is with Gmail, while their algorithm can adapt quickly to changes. Sometimes, like when you’re warming up or trying to change a bad reputation, it can take 3 – 4...
Today I was discussing some mailing list posts with an ESP colleague. He was telling me some interesting numbers he’d collected from different IP pools they maintain. He was testing routing mail through IPs based on subscription process and routing based on engagement metrics. The data showed that inboxing rates were similar across the test groups. As he put it, “IP reputation...
One of those $5.00 words I learned in the lab was gestalt. We were studying fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and, at the time, there were no consistent measurements or numbers that would drive a diagnosis of FAS. Diagnosis was by gestalt – that is by the patient looking like someone who had FAS. It’s a funny word to say, it’s a funny word to hear. But it’s a useful term to...
Hi Laura, Merry Xmas and wishing you a Happy New Year! I recently looked at a popular ESP’s IPv4 space and I was astounded. How does an ESP get an IP allocation of 20,480 IPs? ARIN guidelines do not allow “MX/Mailing” IPs to count towards a valid justification especially in the case when each and every IP is being used for this purpose. That’s 80 /24’s…and at a time when we are out of IPv4 space…...
Dear Laura, Our company has been shopping around for ESPs and most of them want to put us on a shared IP address. I have always heard that senders should get dedicated IPs. Will this hurt our deliverability? Regards, Sharing is Hard Dear Sharing, For a long time, IP reputation was the major factor in identifying good mail from bad mail. Good IPs helped mail get into the inbox. Poor IPs were...
Earlier today I approved a comment from Mike on a post about problems at AOL from 2012. The part of the comment that caught my attention: SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: 521 5.2.1 : AOL will not accept delivery of this message. Mike also mentioned his IP reputation is good, when he checks at AOL so he doesn’t understand why mail is being blocked. I think the big clue...
Reputation is calculated based on actions. Send mail people want and like and interact with and get a good reputation. Send mail people don’t want and don’t like and don’t interact with and get a bad reputation. Reputation is not … about who the sender is. … about legitimacy. … about speech. … about message. Reputation is … about sender...
Almost 2 years ago I wrote a blog post titled The Death of IP Based Reputation. These days I’m even more sure that IP based reputation is well and truly dead for legitimate senders. There are a lot of reasons for this continued change. Improved computing power I touched on the increase in computing power in my 2013 post. The power and the complexity of filters in even greater now than then...
Spam is still 80 – 90% of global email volume, depending on which study look at. Most of that spam doesn’t make it to the inbox; ISPs reject a lot of it during the SMTP transaction and put much of rest of it in the bulk folder. But as the volumes of spam have grown, ISPs and filters are relying more and more on automation. Gone are the days when a team of people could manually review...
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