Reputation monitoring sites

There are a number of sites online that provide public information about reputation of an IP address or domain name.

  1. Sender Score – http://senderscore.org/. Provided by Return Path. They collect data from some ISPs and blocklists. Using a proprietary formula, they calculate a sender score running from 1 – 100 for each IP address sending mail to their network. Higher scores means a better reputation. Can be inaccurate for IPs sending very low volumes of email. Some ISPs use Sender Score to feed into their delivery decision engines.
  2. Sender Base – http://senderbase.org/. Provided by Ironport / Cisco. They collect publicly available data as well as data from their userbase. Reputation is reported as “good” “poor” or “neutral.” Senderbase scores feed into some ISP delivery decision engines.
  3. AOL reputation – http://postmaster.aol.com/cgi-bin/plugh/check_ip.pl. Reports the reputation of IPs as determined by AOL. Uses a scale of “good” “poor” or “neutral”.
  4. RoadRunner blocks – http://security.rr.com/amIBlockedByRR. Reports if a particular IP address is currently being blocked from sending mail to Road Runner.
  5. Spamhaus blocks – http://www.spamhaus.org/. Reports if an IP is currently listed on any of the Spamhaus lists.
  6. Sendmail Reputation – http://sendmail.com/sm/resources/tools/ip_reputation/. Reports reputation of an IP address as measured by Sendmail.
  7. Trusted Source – http://www.trustedsource.org/. Provided by McAfee.
  8. Commtouch – http://www.commtouch.com/check-ip-reputation/. Provided by Commtouch.
  9. Barracuda Central – http://www.barracudacentral.org/lookups/. Provided by Barracuda, shows what IP addresses or domain names are currently blocked.
  10. SNDS – http://postmaster.live.com/snds/. Provided by Microsoft / Hotmail / Live.com. Will show IP addresses that are currently blocked by Microsoft.

Related Posts

Delivery Monitor Closing Down

Delivery Monitor by Aweber is one of the inbox monitoring services available for senders. Aweber has been in the process of winding down Delivery Monitor for the last few months and they will be turning the service off completely tomorrow.
A lot of folks have asked me about replacements for Delivery Monitor. There are, of course, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity, but many of the smaller mailers I talk to can’t justify the expenditure for either service.
Enter Green Arrow Monitor, a service provided by Green Arrow. This is a new seed list service aimed at marketers that need some delivery monitoring at commercial US ISPs. They’re reaching for the middle of the market. As a bonus, they’re offering special pricing for former Delivery Monitor customers.
While they don’t offer all the bells and whistles of other seedbox services, for the small to mid-size company that wants to know what their delivery is like at the major commercial ISPs this is a worthwhile service to investigate.
Full disclosure – I worked with GreenArrow to look at what parts of the market were being missed by other monitoring services and provide delivery consulting for some of their customers.

Read More

AOL EWL: low complaints no longer enough

This morning AOL announced some changes to their Enhanced White List. Given I’ve not talked very much about the AOL EWL in the past, this is as good a time as any to talk about it.
The AOL Enhanced Whitelist is for those senders that have very good practices. Senders on the EWL not only get their mail delivered to the inbox, but also have links and images enabled by default. Placement on the EWL is done solely on the basis of mail performance and only the best senders get on the list.
The new announcement this morning says that AOL will take more into account than just complaints. Previously, senders with the lowest complaint rates qualified for the EWL. Now, senders must also have a good reputation in addition to the low complaint rates. Good reputation is a measure of user engagement with a particular sender.
This change only reinforces what I and many other delivery experts have been saying: The secret to good delivery is to send mail recipients want. ISPs are making delivery decisions based on those measurements. Send mail that recipients want, and there are few delivery problems.
For a long time good delivery was tied closely to complaint rates, so senders focused on complaints. Spammers focused on complaints too, thus managing to actually get some of their spam delivered. ISPs noticed and started looking at other ways to distinguish wanted mail from spam. One of the better ways to separate spam from wanted mail is to look at user engagement. And the ISPs are measuring engagement and using that measurement as part of their decision making process. Send so much mail users don’t read it, and your reputation goes down followed by your delivery rates.

Read More

SPF records: not really all that important

I’ve been working through some Hotmail issues with a client over the last few months. One of the things that has become clear to me is how little Hotmail actually does with SPF records. In fact, Hotmail completely ignored my client’s SPF record and continued to deliver email into the inbox.
This isn’t just a sender that had a “well, we think most of our email will come from these IPs but aren’t telling you to throw away email that doesn’t” record. In fact, this client specifically said “if email doesn’t come from this /28 range of email addresses, then it is unauthorized and should be thrown away.” The email was being sent from an IP outside of the range listed in the SPF record.
As part of the process involved in fixing the delivery problems, I had the client update their SPF record and then I enrolled their domain in the SenderID program at Hotmail. This didn’t have any effect, though. Hotmail is still not checking SPF for this client. When I asked Hotmail what was going on they said, “We do not do lookups on every sender’s mail.”
So, there you have it folks. The last bastion of SPF/SenderID has abandoned the technology. Even a totally invalid SPF record doesn’t matter, mail can still reach the inbox at Hotmail.

Read More