My ISP might get blacklisted

The last 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 so as to provide redundancy against blacklisting of my ISP

Why this is right
If you think that your email is likely to be blocked due to the reputation of your ISP then having a backup ISP makes some operational sense.
Why this is wrong
It’s just very, very wrong. Why are you, an email sending company, buying service from an ISP you expect to be blacklisted? ARE YOU NUTS? Regardless of how cheap the deal an ISP is offering you, if you think that their reputation is bad enough that you need to do your network engineering around the possibility that they’ll be blacklisted, DON’T BUY SERVICE FROM THEM!

Godzill Facepalm
Don't do this, or you'll make Godzilla facepalm

Domain Assurance by Return Path
A short note

Related Posts

Return Path Changes certification standards

Return Path recently announced changes to their certification program. They will no longer be certifying 3rd party mailers.

Read More

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:

Read More

ESPs leaking email addresses

Two of my tagged email addresses started getting identical pharma spam over the weekend. It is annoying me because I am now getting spam in a mailbox that was previously spam free. The spam is overwhelming the real traffic and I am having to make some decisions about what to do with the email addresses and their associated accounts with the companies I gave them to.
One thing I did notice, though, is that both companies use iContact as their ESP. A cursory check of my other mailboxes shows that none of my other tagged addresses are mailed through iContact. I don’t think it’s very likely that these two individual, unrelated companies made deals with the same spammers to sell address lists at the same time. It’s much more likely that there was a compromise somewhere and address lists were stolen.
Edit: Checked my other account and, likewise, I’m getting the same spam to a 3rd address serviced by iContact. I’ve sent mail to all 3 companies involved and we’ll see how they react.
And, as I was thinking about this, iContact just laid off a bunch of staff about the same time they announced their partnership with Goodmail. Based on past history with companies in this situation, it seems possible this is a disgruntled former employee. I’ve also seen reports from other people noticing spam to addresses given to iContact customers.

Read More