Deliverability
How to monitor the reputation of your IP address
The best tools to help you monitor the reputation of your IP to optimize your email deliverability.
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When you send big amount of emails, you have to constantly watch your email reputation. Broadly speaking, “email reputation” is the amount of trust your sender IP enjoys from email inbox providers. Since they don’t give you direct feedback, you have to check the email reputation of your sender IPs yourself. Since there are thousands and thousands of email inbox providers, it’s impossible to check your email reputation at every single one of them.
However, there are a number of sites online that provide information to the public about the reputation of an IP address.
Existing tools
Sender Score - They collect data from certain ISP’s and block lists. They calculate a sender score using a proprietary formula running from 1-100 for each IP address sending mails to their network. Higher the score means having a better reputation. It can be inaccurate for IP’s sending them very low values of e-mail. Some Internet Service Provider’s use this site to feed into their delivery decision engines.
AOL reputation – This site reports the reputation of IP’s as determined by it. Scales of Good, Poor or Neutral can be used.
SenderBase – Provided by Ironport/Cisco. This site publicly collects available data from their user base. Then the reputation is reported by them as good, poor, or neutral. They feed into some Internet Service Provider’s decision engines.
RoadRunner blocks – This site reports whether a particular IP address is currently being blocked from sending mail to RoadRunner or not.
Spamhaus blocks – This site reports whether an IP address is listed currently on the Spamhaus lists or not.
SendmailReputation – This site reports the reputation of an IP address as measured by Sendmail.
Trusted Source – This site is provided by McAfee.
Commtouch – This site is provided by Commtouch.
Barracuada Central – This site is provided by Barracuada and it shows what IP addresses are currently blocked.
SNDS – This site is provided by Microsoft and is used by Hotmail and Live.com. It shows the IP addresses which are currently blocked by Microsoft.
The IP reputation for tracking computer crimes
An IP address must be genuine and the sites mentioned above can be used to check the reputation of the IP address. A bad IP address is one which is intentionally known to send spam or has been identified as a zombie. Either of these can cause the sender’s email being blocked. A zombie computer is one which is compromised by an attacker without the operator’s knowledge. A hacker uses a zombie computer for carrying out illegal activities such as attacking the other computers on the internet network and sending spam emails.
SPAM emails are unsolicited emails used for spreading dangerous computer data. The owner of the zombie computer can be held for all the illegal activities taking place in the background and can also be held liable for the entire unknown activity.
Because of this, checking the IP address reputation is a great tool for staying alert. The huge number of sites can be used to check the reputation of the IP address and the user can be protected from various unhealthy threats.
How do you keep track of your IP reputation? Let us know!
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