IP reputation is a going to be more and more relevant as marketers are using (and abusing) web services like email marketing, regular email updates, subscription emails etc. One of the best defintion of SPAM is available at spamhaus.org

The word “Spam” as applied to Email means “Unsolicited Bulk Email”.

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

* Unsolicited Email is normal email
(examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)

* Bulk Email is normal email
(examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

Spam is an issue about consent, not content. Whether the Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”) message is an advert, a scam, porn, a begging letter or an offer of a free lunch, the content is irrelevant – if the message was sent unsolicited and in bulk then the message is spam.

Spam is not a sub-set of UBE, it is not “UBE that is also a scam or that doesn’t contain an unsubscribe link”. All email sent unsolicited and in bulk is Spam.

Again if you are looking for some email marketing links then you must not miss http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Marketing%20FAQs

So how do we ensure that emails land in inbox than spam box. In this post I will not talk about SPF or crypto authentication as I have written some posts about it already. SPF is very easy to set and one must set it. But only have SPF or crypto is not sufficient, you need to check the reputation of your IP, here are some tools for it:

1. http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/detailip?search_string=59.164.133.51 – This is a very powerful initiative by Cisco.
2. http://spamblock.outblaze.com/59.164.133.51 – Interesting that our IP is on block list, thanks to the Indian IP , we are on US VPN which is safer.
3. http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=59.164.133.51 – This is a powerful tool, liked the whole website, whole lot of information about email marketing and email security.
4. http://cbl.abuseat.org/lookup.cgi?ip=59.164.133.51&.submit=Lookup
5. http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup?ip_address=59.164.133.51
6. http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&ip=59.164.133.51 – Some reading stuff available

Now running a proper email marketing is a big challenge. We are hosting our welcome email IP different than the main email sending server.

Will love to hear your experience with different email marketing campaigns that you have run so far.