IP Reputation Management

Email deliverability depends heavily on the reputation of the sending IP addresses. At MXroute, we prioritize maintaining excellent IP reputation to ensure your emails successfully reach their intended recipients.

Understanding IP Reputation

IP reputation is the trustworthiness score that receiving mail servers assign to sending IP addresses. This score is influenced by:

• Email sending patterns
• Spam complaints
• Bounce rates
• Volume consistency
• Authentication practices (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
• Content quality

When you send email through MXroute, your messages share IP addresses with other customers. This shared infrastructure model makes IP reputation management critical for everyone's success.

Why We Take IP Reputation Seriously

Before MXroute was founded, we observed that many businesses and individuals faced persistent email delivery problems, even when sending legitimate messages. Major email providers (like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) were increasingly strict about what emails they would accept.

Our mission is to solve this problem. We've built our entire system around maintaining pristine IP reputations to maximize deliverability for all customers.

Our Multi-Layer IP Protection System

1. Proactive Monitoring & Restrictions

We enforce certain restrictions to prevent reputation damage:

• Blocking attempts to send to invalid recipients
• Preventing delivery to unverified bulk mailing lists
• Automated monitoring for suspicious patterns or spam signatures using standard open source tools
• Limiting certain types of automated or bulk sending behavior

These protections may occasionally feel restrictive, but they're essential for maintaining the high deliverability rates our customers expect.

2. Outbound Email Filtering

Before your email even leaves our servers:

• Messages are automatically scanned using standard open source software like SpamAssassin and Rspamd with custom rule sets
• Quality checks are performed on formatting and content through automated systems
• Authentication is verified and strengthened where possible

Privacy Note

All email scanning is performed by automated systems using industry-standard open source tools. The contents of your emails are never read by MXroute staff. Our scanning only looks for technical characteristics and patterns commonly associated with spam, not the actual content or meaning of your messages.

3. Intelligent IP Rotation & Management

Our outbound email system uses multiple relay servers to deliver your messages:

• If we detect a potential reputation issue with an IP address, we immediately:
  • Remove that IP from production temporarily
  • Investigate and address the underlying issue
  • Route emails through alternate clean IP addresses

4. Backup Delivery Through mail.baby

If initial delivery attempts encounter difficulty:

• Your email is automatically routed through our mail.baby service
• This service attempts delivery from multiple independent IP pools
• Delivery attempts continue for 24 hours
• Different sending patterns and delivery methods are used to maximize chances of success
• If all attempts fail after 24 hours, you'll receive a bounce notification

Best Practices for Maintaining Good IP Reputation

As an MXroute customer, you play a crucial role in maintaining our collective IP reputation:

Do:

• Keep your recipient lists clean and up-to-date
• Honor unsubscribe requests promptly
• Send content that recipients have explicitly requested
• Implement proper authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
• Monitor your bounce rates and address issues quickly

Don't:

• Purchase or use third-party email lists
• Send to recipients who haven't explicitly opted in
• Ignore high bounce rates or spam complaints
• Send bulk emails without proper list management
• Use deceptive subject lines or misleading content

Understanding Delivery Issues

If your emails aren't being delivered despite our protection systems:

1. Check recipient spam folders - Sometimes legitimate messages are filtered there
2. Verify your authentication - Ensure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are properly configured
3. Test with mail-tester.com - Get an objective assessment of your email's deliverability
4. Review your content - Some content triggers spam filters regardless of sender reputation
5. Check recipient domain reputation - Some domains have strict incoming mail policies

Our Commitment to You

We're all connected in the email ecosystem. When one customer sends problematic emails, it can potentially affect everyone using our service. That's why we take IP reputation so seriously.

We're committed to:

• Maintaining clean, reputable IP addresses
• Providing the infrastructure needed for successful email delivery
• Protecting the collective reputation of our customer base
• Being transparent about our policies and practices

This approach has allowed us to deliver exceptional deliverability rates for our customers, even as email filtering has become increasingly strict across the industry.