A good habit to follow before sending your bulk email is to look up the IP reputation of your SMTP service.
IP reputation is the major contributor to delivery rates, especially if you are sending to the largest ISP’s, e.g. Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail. Statistics show that 83% of the time, sender reputation is the real cause of filtering: by monitoring it you will be able to identify problems affecting your sender reputation, determine the causes, and fix them.
Here are some of the major metrics ISPs look at when managing the message sent into their system:
– volume of emails (illegitimate bulk mail do normally trigger spam filters)
– spamtraps hits (old inboxes that ISPs reactivate specifically to trap spammers )
– invalid address rates (hard bounces)
– complaints rates (how often recipients hit the “report spam” button to response to your message)
The good news is that there are some online services that let you check your IP reputation. We recommend these four Free ones:
It’s the most popular. With their tool you’ll know right away what ISPs think of your email program. Just enter an IP address and you’ll get a simple score based entirely on the metrics that distinguish legitimate email from spam: volume, complaint rates, unknown user rates, infrastructure, spam trap hits and content.
Senderbase allows you to query the email and web reputation for almost any IP address sending email or Domain on the Internet. Ip reputation score is grouped into Good, Neutral or Poor.
The Barracuda Reputation System is a real-time database of IP addresses that have a “poor” reputation for sending valid emails. Barracuda Central maintains and manually verifies all IP addresses marked as “poor” on the Barracuda Reputation System.
An effective defense reputation service for email and Web security.
To discover the Internet IP address from which your emails has been sent you need to analyze their headers, in particular consider the first “received” information. That’s the IP address you should monitor with these tools.