Warm Up and Reputation Building

What is IP Warming?

Essentially, warming an IP address is ultimately the process of sending out new streams of email on a controlled basis to allow time for the email to develop a positive reputation with inbox providers/ISPs and lay the foundation for successful, long-term email deliverability.

In order to give your messages the highest odds of reaching recipients’ inboxes, we initially shape the rate we send messages from new accounts in a process called traffic shaping. The period this takes place, the “warm-up” period, is the length of time during which we are shaping delivery rates to allow for optimal long-term deliverability. Note: Traffic shaping does not affect the rate at which we will accept your messages at our SMTP gateway, or via our Injection API.

There is a science behind the traffic shaping process here at SocketLabs. It allows your IP address or addresses to develop a positive sending reputation. Doing so requires a little patience on your end as we work with you to get your account warm, whether you’re sending via our shared IPs or have been set up by our team to use one or more dedicated IP addresses. Check out our video and blog on IP warming and how it works here. The goal is to get your domain to be recognized as reputable by the major ISPs and receiving domains out there. This way the receiving domains and ISPs are much more likely to accept and inbox your messages.

Why do We Warm Up IPs?

In this day and age anti-spam systems and email filtering tools are very smart. Gmail’s filters, for example, look at hundreds of different data points when determining inbox placement of a message. Our goal with restricting delivery rates is to introduce your messages to the filters in a way that lets the filter know the messages are legitimate. If you want to learn more about how spam filters work, check out our blog on the topic here!

To understand why this is necessary you have to think about it from the point of view of a mailbox provider. Recent estimates have claimed that over 80% of email traffic on the internet is spam. The spammers are in a constant battle with mailbox providers in an effort to get their messages into the inbox. Once a spammer’s attack avenue becomes blocked, they quickly scatter to find a new route for delivery. This means that mailbox providers are under a constant onslaught of attacks that originate from all new sources. Since spam sources are easily detected and blocked, often times malicious users will send as much mail as they can as quickly as possible.

The way that we initially restrict delivery rates helps make you appear as a legitimate sender and makes your messages more likely to land right into the inbox.

How Does IP Warming Work at SocketLabs?

While all accounts need some degree of warming, if you are going to be sending high volumes of email, SocketLabs provides a managed warm-up process where our team directly assists with and optimizes the process to ensure a successful transition.

To give examples, there are often customers who come onto the SocketLabs platform that are bringing over a domain that they’ve been sending with previously. This domain has a strong reputation because they have been sending very high-quality email. The messages are a large volume of transactional alerts, so they have an existing strong domain reputation. This really helps the transition process when coming over to SocketLabs. Having that domain reputation is invaluable.

Typically, this type of new customer would benefit from using a dedicated IP address where they can build their own reputation. However, remember that even a dedicated IP address starts out cold. Therefore, there are concerns that we need to be careful of as we warm up. When working with a customer that sends high-quality email, we are able to temporarily use some of our shared IP address space (which has a very strong reputation) as a transitional solution to help alleviate some of that warm-up time. Traffic is at first brought on 100% onto the shared IPs, and then slowly transitioned throughout the warm-up period over to the customer’s dedicated IP space. These types of migrations go much faster, take much shorter periods of time, and have much better success. That’s one of the biggest keys to success – starting slowly and making that transition very smoothly over time so that there are no jumps and spikes in volume. It really makes for a much better experience.

By contrast, sending from a new dedicated IP address and first-time sending through a new domain would involve far more variability. That type of warm-up scenario is going to take a little bit more time. Our team takes all of these factors into consideration to help simplify and ease the warm-up process.

What is an IP Reputation and How do I Find Mine?

One of the biggest factors that determines your deliverability is your IP reputation. Believe it or not, some senders don’t even know that such a thing exists. If you fall into that category, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered! Every time you send an email, your IP address is a part of the email header, not visible to the recipient. Because your IP address is a part of every email you send, mailbox providers are able to monitor your sending practices. As these mailbox providers collect data on your sending habits and recipient reactions, you will start to build a reputation associated with your IP address. To check your IP reputation, Google provides a free set of tools that enables you to monitor your reputation and other metrics. To learn more about Google Postmaster Tools, check out our blog on how to use them.

Mailbox providers use reputation information to find and stop senders whose habits reflect that of a spammer or bad actor. They also use good sending practice data to improve your reputation and get your email to the inbox.

What is Right For You

The overwhelming amount of spam in the world is truly shocking. We are all working together in a daily battle between legitimate mail and spam and are fighting our way to get the inbox. This reality is why warming up your own positive sending reputation and isolating your environment from other senders on a dedicated IP is really paramount to your overall long-term success.

SocketLabs is known for having a pristine sending environment as we do not allow any spam or unsolicited mail to be sent from our network. With other service providers that allow organizations to use shared IP space, it really doesn’t take much for one of those shared IPs to become damaged or have some reputation issues. These issues can then lead to delivery issues. Bad practices like purchasing data, sending to bad addresses, and sending old addresses (that may have spam traps) can really interfere with a shared IP range. One company’s bad choices can ruin the party and cause poor delivery for everyone else on those same shared IPs. That’s why properly warming up your own dedicated IPs and building your own sending reputation is critical for advanced senders.

Note: SocketLabs does not typically recommend Dedicated IPs for Basic customers who send fewer than 100,000 emails per month.