5 ms·

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and

by eloff 10y ago

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

agopaul 10y ago
I found this service a few days ago to monitor our own deliverability. It allows you to test if your emails are delivered by the most common ESPs: https://glockapps.com https://glockapps.com (I do not have anything to do with the product or team behind it)
- teddyh 10y ago
  Similar service here: https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ (I am likewise unaffiliated.)
tyingq 10y ago
The term to search for is "RBL" (real time blacklist). Search for "check rbl" to find interactive sites, or maybe "check rbl github" for code that you can use yourself (though you may have to sign up for several services if you go that route). Neither, though, helps with checking if one of the big providers, like Google, would not like your IP. For those, you have to send an email and watch/parse the SMTP error responses.
edwhitesell 10y ago
Even so, this may not be very beneficial. In years past, many RBLs would categorize IP Addresses by type. e.g. dynamic IPs assigned to DSL/Cable subscribers. This would enable a receving SMTP server to check if the email came from an ISP subscriber, rather than an email server. If so, it was usually a good guage that the email was "spammy", because it was sent by a subscriber's infected computer. In this sense, it was (and may still be) possible to simply block, or at least score differently, email from any/all AWS Elasic IPs.
dordoka 10y ago
You can check the Spamhaus lists. It's a non-profit org dedicated to all-things-spam. https://www.spamhaus.org/ https://www.spamhaus.org/
j_s 10y ago
http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855145 https://senderscore.org/ https://senderscore.org/ per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156312 http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329371 http://multirbl.valli.org/ http://multirbl.valli.org/ per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330382
massaman_yams 10y ago
In practice, while there are some services which will purport to tell you an IP's reputation, their output isn't well correlated with actual delivery outcomes at scale (depending, to some extent, on what domains you're sending to). This is because the big consumer mailbox providers often don't rely on public datasources for assessing reputation, and because reputation is tracked at the domain level, in addition to - or sometimes instead of - the IP level. For example, there have been some indications from Gmail that they no longer use IP reputation at all, starting a year or two ago. And re: blacklists: +1 to Spamhaus, but in practice it's one of very few blacklists that have meaningful impact to net delivery.
- ams6110 10y ago
  > there have been some indications from Gmail that they no longer use IP reputation at all I can believe it. I posted already about my experience with the free tier of Mailgun's service. I went through all their instructions about setting up the service and verifying my domain etc. but still had a lot of email rejected, especially by yahoo.com but also hotmail.com due to poor reputation IPs Gmail.com typically delivered everything.

by eloff 10y ago

How can you check if an IP is good or spammy? It would be nice to get an elastic IP in the cloud, test it for spamminess, and give back the bad ones. Catch and release fishing for IPs.

agopaul 10y ago

I found this service a few days ago to monitor our own deliverability. It allows you to test if your emails are delivered by the most common ESPs: https://glockapps.com https://glockapps.com (I do not have anything to do with the product or team behind it)

teddyh 10y ago
Similar service here: https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ (I am likewise unaffiliated.)

tyingq 10y ago

The term to search for is "RBL" (real time blacklist). Search for "check rbl" to find interactive sites, or maybe "check rbl github" for code that you can use yourself (though you may have to sign up for several services if you go that route). Neither, though, helps with checking if one of the big providers, like Google, would not like your IP. For those, you have to send an email and watch/parse the SMTP error responses.

edwhitesell 10y ago

Even so, this may not be very beneficial. In years past, many RBLs would categorize IP Addresses by type. e.g. dynamic IPs assigned to DSL/Cable subscribers. This would enable a receving SMTP server to check if the email came from an ISP subscriber, rather than an email server. If so, it was usually a good guage that the email was "spammy", because it was sent by a subscriber's infected computer. In this sense, it was (and may still be) possible to simply block, or at least score differently, email from any/all AWS Elasic IPs.

dordoka 10y ago

You can check the Spamhaus lists. It's a non-profit org dedicated to all-things-spam. https://www.spamhaus.org/ https://www.spamhaus.org/

j_s 10y ago

http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855145 https://senderscore.org/ https://senderscore.org/ per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9156312 http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329371 http://multirbl.valli.org/ http://multirbl.valli.org/ per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330382

massaman_yams 10y ago

In practice, while there are some services which will purport to tell you an IP's reputation, their output isn't well correlated with actual delivery outcomes at scale (depending, to some extent, on what domains you're sending to). This is because the big consumer mailbox providers often don't rely on public datasources for assessing reputation, and because reputation is tracked at the domain level, in addition to - or sometimes instead of - the IP level. For example, there have been some indications from Gmail that they no longer use IP reputation at all, starting a year or two ago. And re: blacklists: +1 to Spamhaus, but in practice it's one of very few blacklists that have meaningful impact to net delivery.

ams6110 10y ago
> there have been some indications from Gmail that they no longer use IP reputation at all I can believe it. I posted already about my experience with the free tier of Mailgun's service. I went through all their instructions about setting up the service and verifying my domain etc. but still had a lot of email rejected, especially by yahoo.com but also hotmail.com due to poor reputation IPs Gmail.com typically delivered everything.