How your IP address affects your deliverability

Posted March 9, 2016

In Email Deliverability, Email Infrastructure

Behind every email that you send, there is a whole world that exists. It depends on how you, as a sender, make use of the emails you send and whether you send useful emails to your customers or whether what you send ends up in their spam mail. The reputation of your email is always in your control. This article strives to help you maintain your sender reputation so that your emails are sent always reach your customer’s inbox and doesn’t land anywhere else.

Emails are sent via IP addresses. These serve as unique identifiers of email streams. IP addresses can be shared or dedicated.

Shared IP address:

When you share an IP address, you exert relatively less amount of control on your reputation as this address is used by numerous other senders as well. Your Sender reputation, with a shared IP address, depends on the practices of the other senders as well. This means, if they use good email practices, you can reap the benefits, while on the other hand if they don’t, you will have to bear the burden of this as well.

While on the shared IP space, it’s the primary responsibility of the ESP to regularly monitor the sender activity to ensure that everyone is adhering to the specified rules and maximizing the opportunity for their customers. But, not every ESP is so evolved to handle all of these in real time. Hence, if you haven’t chosen the right ESP, then there is a potential risk of using the shared IP space, which can also impact the reputation of your sender domain.

Dedicated IP address:

On the flip side of the coin is a dedicated IP.

The reputation of email senders increases as you maintain a consistent email volume:

Dedicated IPs are good when you are sending a good volume of emails and don’t want to take a risk of being affected by other bad senders. While there is no clear threshold of a low volume sender, but if you send less than 200k emails per year, then it might not be worth moving to a dedicated IP. ISPs like to see consistent patterns in sending so if you don’t have high activity levels you could end up with no reputation resulting in low email delivery rates.

Correction of mistakes in a dedicated IP address is more difficult than other corrections:

But, at the same time, you have to be very careful with dedicated IPs. Any small mistake can lead to a big reputation problem and it is going to be very difficult to correct the same, as the entire responsibility is upon you, your content and the database on which you are sending emails.

There are various hitches when it comes to using a dedicated IP address. Some of them are as follows:
- When you opt for a dedicated IP, you are giving no history to the spam filters in terms of your legit-ness and this will (in most cases) work against you.

However, if you are not using a dedicated IP address, you have less control on your IP reputation as you could be impacted by the other sender’s bad practices.

How Do I Know Which One To Get?

A simple recommendation is, if you are a good sender with a good volume of emails then go for dedicated IP address this will help you in long run, else choose a good ESP who are best in delivery and monitoring for shared IP addresses.

Today, 85% of emails sent are spam. This implies that the email eco-system is polluted with many, many unwanted emails from bogus senders. This and other articles which we publish aim at helping you to distinguish yourself from other deceptive email senders.

Also, for more information on our cloud-based email delivery platform, shoot us at support@pepipost.com