A throwback post from a few years ago on IP reputation. Why IP addresses? ISPs built reputation around IP addresses because it was one bit of data that malicious senders / spammers couldn’t forge. The connecting IP is a fundamental part of the network transaction and if you forge an IP then SMTP can’t work. Because that was the reliable data they had to work with, that’s what they used. Even now...
IP reputation is a measure of how much wanted mail a particular IP address sends. This wanted mail is measured as a portion of the total email sent from that IP. Initially IP reputation was really the be all and end all of reputation, there was no real good way to authenticate a domain or a from address. Many ISPs built complex IP reputation models to evaluate mail based on the IP that sent the...
One thing that came out of the ISP session at M3AAWG is that domains need to be warmed up, too. I can’t remember exactly which ISP rep said it, but there was general nodding across the panel when this was said. This isn’t just the domain in the reverse DNS of the sending IP, but also domains used in the Return Path (Envelope From) and visible from. From the ISP’s perspective...
Back in the dark ages of email delivery the only thing that really mattered to get your email into the inbox was having a good IP reputation. If your IP sent good mail most of the time, then that mail got into the inbox and all was well with the world. All that mattered was that good IP reputation. Even better for the people who wanted to game the system and get their spam into the inbox, there...
On the first installment of our Wednesday question series, I chose a question from twitter. Can you advise is Amazon SES is a reputable place to send email from? @inkpixelspaper This is a great question. In many cases the reputation of a provider doesn’t affect delivery, but as with almost everything in email there are exceptions and cases where a poor provider reputation may affect...
Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. (Get the Report) This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report. To be honest, I’m not surprised at the decrease. Filters are getting more sophisticated. This means...
There has been a lot of recent discussion and questions about reputation, content and delivery. I started to answer some of them, and then realized there weren’t any basic reference documents I could refer to when explaining the interaction. So I decided to write some. This first post is about IP address reputation with some background on why IPs are so important and why ISPs focus so...
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