I want to avoid network outages

Number six of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly.

I need multiple IP addresses in different locations to provide redundancy against network outages

Why this is right
If all your traffic goes out via a single ISP and your connection to that ISP is eaten by a backhoe you’re  not going to be sending any email until that’s fixed. And from personal experience I know that can easily take two or three days for even minor fiber damage.
But be careful
You need to be sending email fairly consistently from an IP address in order to maintain a decent reputation for that mail source. If you treat a second location as a cold standby, only used when your main ISP breaks, expect to see serious delivery problems as you migrate across to it. Better to spread load across both locations, to keep both sets of addresses “warm” – but remember that that will halve the amount of traffic that a receiving ISP will see from any given IP address, which will change your decisions about whether to assign customers to a pool or not.
A better architecture
If all your production machines – smarthosts, webservers, databases – are hosted in a high quality datacenter run by an ISP with redundant connections to the Internet then you don’t need to worry about the redundancy yourself. If one of those connections is broken the ISP will route the traffic over a different connection to the same IP addresses mostly transparently. You won’t need to reconfigure anything, it’ll just keep working.
(Why don’t you just have redundant connections to servers hosted at your offices? First, it’s very expensive and time consuming to handle the mechanical aspects of ensuring that your two connections are really redundant, rather than being multiplexed onto the same fiber or running in the same conduit. Second, the smallest block of addresses you can multi-home in this way is 1000, and you can’t acquire those unless you’re already using more than 500 IP addresses efficiently.)
The weak point then is the connection between your offices and your datacenter that you need to administer the servers and provide customer support. But the IP addresses used for that don’t matter, so it’s easy and cheap to have a backup connection – even a cheap consumer cable or DSL connection. Or, if you’re a very small company, have your customer support folks use laptops and know which local coffeeshops and bars have free wifi.

Hello Kitty Backhoe is nearly as scary as Godzilla

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I need IP addresses to handle the volume

Number two of seven in our occasional series on why ESPs need, or don’t need, lots of IP addresses to send mail properly.

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Why do you need so many IP addresses (part 2)?

In my last post I discussed the background as to why an ISP will require their users to use their IP address allocation efficiently. I also mentioned in passing that I’d discussed ESP address allocation with both ESPs and ISPs recently.
The ESP was talking about assigning a couple of dozen IP addresses to each customer, because they might be useful for spreading load and it would provide some flexibility for moving from one IP address to another if one should get blocked. And IP addresses are pretty much free. They were wrong.
The ISP was considering an application for 750 IP addresses from a new ESP customer. They assumed that there was no possible reason other than snowshoe spam for an email related customer to need that many IP addresses. While I suspect they may have been right about the specific potential customer, the general assumption was wrong.
I’ve seen a lot of reasons given by ESPs for why they need so many IP addresses:

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This is why the ISPs throw up their hands at senders

I recently saw a question from an ESP rep asking if anyone had a personal contact at a particular ISP. The problem was that they had a rejection from the ISP saying: 571 5.7.1 too many recipients this session. The ESP was looking for someone at the ISP in order to ask what the problem was.
This is exactly the kind of behaviour that drives ISPs bonkers about senders. The ISP has sent a perfectly understandable rejection: “5.7.1: too many recipients this session.” And instead of spending some time and energy on the sender side troubleshooting, instead of spending some of their own money to work out what’s going on, they fall back on asking the ISPs to explain what they should do differently.
What, exactly, should you do differently? Stop sending so many recipients in a single session. This is not rocket science. The ISP tells you exactly what you need to do differently, and your first reaction is to attempt to mail postmaster@ the ISP and then, when that bounces, your next step is to look for a personal contact?
No. No. No.
Look, connections and addresses per connections is one of the absolute easiest things to troubleshoot. Fire up a shell, telnet to port 25 on the recipient server, and do a hand SMTP session, count the number of receipts. Sure, in some corporate situations it can be a PITA to do, sometimes you’re going to need to get it done from a particular IP which may be an interface on an appliance and doesn’t have telnet or whatever. But, y’know what? That Is Your Job.  If your company isn’t able to do it, well, please tell me so I can stop recommending that as an ESP. Companies have to be able to test and troubleshoot their own networks.
Senders have been begging ISPs for years “just tell us what you want and we’ll bother you less.” In this case the ISP was extremely clear about what they want: they want fewer recipients per connection. But the ESP delivery person is still looking for a contact so they can talk to the ISP to understand it better.
This is why the ISPs get so annoyed with senders. They’re tired of having to do the sender’s job.

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