Legitimate mailers do not need to rotate IPs

Legitimate mailers do not need to rotate IPs and are white listed at most of the major email providers.

It seems you :

- never had to send newsletters to hundred of thousands of addresses,

- think white-listed mailers are legitimate (think again: whitelisting is paid for, it has become a market with its grey areas).

When you hit the kind of traffic that comes with a big newsletter you get the occasional recipient which double opted-in for a newsletter and then clicks on Junk when receiving it instead of unsubscribing properly. Usually a big newsletter can't exist if there isn't a paid service behind, so there's a market and rivals. The "unhappy recipient" might very well be a rival trying to lower your reputation to make your job more difficult. Although I didn't witness it first-hand, others have. In my experience it doesn't take many of them (trigger-happy recipients or naughty rivals) to make things ugly when you don't have a number of outgoing IP addresses scaled appropriately.

Major email providers don't bother white listing small players (less than several tens or hundreds of millions of emails/day) because they simply don't care if mails from them are occasionally dropped, their users would not complain or at least not to them. For example if we didn't use rotating IPs our email servers would be tarpitted by Yahoo (which is the most aggressive) and would stop trying delivering emails after 5 days, triggering undeliverable errors which would automatically unsubscribe customers for whom delivery would not have been possible.


Even though your reasoning is rational, I've never seen in my experience or hear a "rival" or someone trying to blacklist you...trust me when I say there are much better, simpler and faster ways than that to ruin a host's reputation.

That being said, I'd doubt any provider would "rotate" the IPs, I would personally kick their ass for even providing such service in the first place. Also remember, when you do get the occasional spam complaint from a "double opt-in subscriber", just make sure you remove their email from your database as soon as you receive the complaint, 99.99999% of the time this should take care of the issue.

We've also dealt with those so-called "big" email providers such as yahoo, gmail and aol numerous times. I'll admit AOL is sort of a pain in the ass to submit a whitelist request but as long as you submit a formal request, usually all of them will remove with in 48 hours or less.