Getting into the inbox with Sparkpost

Question

During testing of sparkpost we are getting into the inbox with gmail, yahoo and aol, but not with microsoft. We are getting an 8 on microsoft's bulk complaint level which AFAIK is associated with the IP used.

We are evaluating either switching to a dedicated IP or switching to another service provider on a shared IP.

One thing that puts us off a dedicated IP is the extra admin that would be involved in keeping the IP off blacklists. Some blogs also mention that you need a certain amount of traffic to maintain sender reputation (though they are vague on how much that might be - I guess because there are no hard and fast rules). Since a lot of the stuff on the web is not impartial and is based on different use cases and potentially out of date, I would appreciate some thoughts based on experience from people in a similar boat.

If you are on a dedicated IP, how many emails per month are you sending? Has monitoring your dedicated IP for blacklisting been an issue?

If you are on a shared IP (either on sparkpost or other servers) have you had trouble getting into microsoft inboxes or with the BCL? Thanks in advance for all your thoughts.

Answer 1

"One thing that puts us off a dedicated IP is the extra admin that would be involved in keeping the IP off blacklists. "

That's one of Sparkpost's responsibilities (although you should also monitor, just in case, I particularly like http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/).

"If you are on a dedicated IP, how many emails per month are you sending? Has monitoring your dedicated IP for blacklisting been an issue?"

We send around 200k emails per month from ~ 25 domains, all on the same IP. We haven't had issues being blacklisted, but some clients have had issues with their domain appearing on some blacklists, especially if it was their first mailing (with invalid addresses).

Answer 2

Same advise here, we have all our customers on a few private IPs as this is the only way to not end-up been blacklisted. If you are sending with the default provider's service, tens of thousands of other domains also are, and nobody controls what they are sending - odds are that there will be at least one 'bad apple' that will get the IP blacklisted and impact all other customers. The providers usually react quickly to these incidents by moving to other IPs, but everyone is still affected at least temporarily.

Answer 3

Getting your own IP with SparkPost doesn't lessen their activity or responsibility under their contract to provide whitelisting for you. It probably makes it easier for them to respond quickly and effectively when it does happen. We don't monitor blacklisting ourselves because these services will notify us immediately if we appear on any blacklist.

One of my clients sends 600k+ emails / month with sendgrid on a private IP. They were very helpful when we got blacklisted due to a new type of attack (bringing down a small set of inboxes, in this case mainly .gov, by having a bot submit subscribe requests simultaneously to a very large number of sites). The client reluctantly agreed to use recaptcha, and we had to reconfirm all of the signups for a few prior months.

I'd encourage getting the IP.