Out of the 347 billion emails sent every day, a staggering 160 billion fall prey to IP spam, causing businesses to lose billions in revenue annually.
These are IP addresses that email servers mark as spam to protect the recipient’s inbox. Such IPs gain a negative reputation due to their past unethical activities.
Understanding and avoiding IP spam is crucial for businesses and individuals. It ensures that emails reach their intended recipients. Better cybersecurity also helps your customers trust you more.
Follow our guidelines to help your cold emails hit the mark, reduce potentially missed opportunities, and maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Table of Contents
What is IP Spam?
IP spam means an IP address is flagged as spam due to suspicious web activity in the past. It’s been added to a blacklist—a database of IP addresses identified as sources of spam by various Internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs).
Think of IP address span as getting a bad mark on your record. This signals to other services that they should be aware of interacting with you.
Types of IP Spam
Email Spam
These unwanted junk emails are sent out in bulk to an indiscriminate recipient list. Typically, spam is sent for commercial purposes. Spam emails are usually sent in massive volumes by botnet networks of infected computers.
These messages often promote products and services or contain deceptive links. They can be annoying and, at times, harmful.
Comment Spam (Blog, Social media)
Comment spam is any comment on your blog that doesn’t ask a relevant question, contribute an appropriate thought, or compliment the article.
Hackers and bots often leave spam comments to link visitors back to their websites. This includes fake accounts, fake likes and shares, or the spread of misleading content. The goal is usually to harvest user data or peddle scams.
Messaging Spam
These are unwanted messages that we receive through instant messaging applications, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc.
They can also be sent using SMS. Spam with intrusive advertising annoys you and probably contains spyware or viruses.
How Spammers Operate
Compromised Devices and Botnets
A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots.
Botnets perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. They also steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its connection.
Cybercriminals infect devices with malware for this reason. This way, they control the compromised devices remotely.
They often use command-and-control (C&C) servers or peer-to-peer (P2P) communication methods to manage the bots.
Using Fake/Misleading Email
Scammers use fake or misleading emails to trick users. They try to copy an actual email. It looks legit, but if you scan it, you’ll catch it.
Scammers trick you so that you give them your personal and financial information.
Bulk Messages Without Proper Authentication
When cybercriminals “phish,” they send fraudulent emails that seek to trick the recipient into clicking on a malicious link. Smishing simply uses text messages instead of email.
In essence, these cybercriminals are out to steal your data, which they can then use to commit fraud or other cybercrimes.
How IP Spam Affects Your Business
Damage to Reputation
The quickest way to erode your business’ credibility and customer trust is through spam. Spam makes people feel like their privacy has been violated, and they lose confidence in the brand.
Decisions are made on reliability and credibility, and losing trust can be bad for your business in the long run.
Impact on Deliverability
IP spam can raise the spam flag for your emails, which means you miss out on essential communications reaching the inbox.
Whether you send transactional emails or carefully planned email marketing, your server IP’s reputation does impact your email deliverability.
Resource Drain
Spam takes up a lot of server resources and can slow down or disrupt business operations. Managing spam also consumes IT resources because it needs robust filtering systems, raises operational costs, and causes network and server downtime.
Security Risks
Spam can carry malicious payloads, such as phishing attempts, ransomware, or malware. Phishing scams can steal all the information an attacker needs to log into your accounts, so you must never click on suspicious links.
For example, it’s common for hackers to send emails that look like they’re from a company you trust. They’ll ask for your password or other personal information.
Common Tactics Spammers Use to Avoid Detection
IP Rotation
Spammers change IP addresses to avoid detection and be able to send spam continuously.
IP rotation means switching between multiple IP addresses to send emails rather than relying on a single IP address. There are rotating proxy services out there that let users send each request with a different IP. They have a pool of thousands of IP addresses.
Domain Spoofing
Domain spoofing is often used in phishing attacks. These attacks aim to steal personal information, such as account login credentials or credit card details, trick the victim into sending money to the attacker, or trick a user into downloading malware.
Attackers can act like legitimate domain names. They create similar domain names or subdomains.
For example, an attacker could create a fake domain name, “yahooo.com,” with three “o’s” instead of two, making it difficult to distinguish it from the actual Yahoo website.
Email Spoofing
In email spoofing, attackers attempt to fake an email address generally as part of phishing attacks.
By changing specific properties of the email, such as the ‘From,’ ‘Reply-To,’ and ‘Return-Path’ fields in the message header, malicious users can make the email appear to be from someone other than the actual sender. While most often used for malicious intent, spoofing can also be used legitimately.
Using Compromised Accounts
Spammers send spam from hacked accounts to bypass IP blacklisting. After an attacker steals the credentials and gains access to the account, they can access the mailbox.
Attackers often use the compromised mailbox to send email as the original user to recipients inside and outside of the organization.
How to Prevent IP Spam
IP Reputation Management
Regularly monitor IP addresses to ensure they aren’t blacklisted and utilize IP reputation services to track and maintain a clean IP reputation.
Email Authentication Protocols
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
An SPF record identifies the mail servers and domains that are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain.
Receiving servers, check your SPF record to confirm that incoming messages that seem to be from your organization are sent from servers you allow.
A receiving mail server performs an SPF check to verify that the domain in the “envelope from” address in the email header matches a valid IP address in the SPF record. If the addresses don’t match, the email fails the SPF test, and the email receiver can reject the email.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
DKIM is an email authentication method. It uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the domain owner. It also helps with email security. Matching keys opens the door to deliverability.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)
DMARC is an anti-spoofing protection built along with SPF and DKIM applications. Working together, the three mechanisms verify legitimate emails and reject untrustworthy messages from reaching the inbox.
Content Filtering
Content filtering implements machine learning-based filtering to adapt to new spam tactics.
Basically, it evaluates inbound email messages by assessing the chances that they are legitimate or spam. Content filtering uses characteristics from a statistically significant sample of legitimate messages and spam to make its determination.
Rate Limiting and Throttling
Rate limiting happens when a recipient mail server doesn’t allow emails to be delivered at the same rate as they were sent.
Exceeding these limitations results in throttling. Email throttling means strategically regulating the number of emails sent within a given timeframe to prevent sending spikes that can harm deliverability.
It also improves email deliverability, reducing the likelihood of emails being marked as spam or blocked by email filters.
Blacklist Monitoring and Removal
Regularly check blacklists for any listed IPs.The blacklist check tests a mail server IP address against over 100 DNS-based email pools. (Commonly called Realtime blacklist, DNSBL, or RBL).
If your mail server has been blacklisted, some email you send may not be delivered. Email blacklists are a common way of reducing spam.
How to Check IP Spam
Want to check if your IP has been abused? Here are the step-by-step instructions:
- Check your IP from https://www.whatismyip.com/.
- Go to https://check.spamhaus.org/.
- Enter your IP address and click Lookup.
- See the results.
How V6Proxies Can Help
It’s crucial to understand IP spam so that you can prevent it to the best of your ability.
V6Proxies offers proxies and VPN services with 0% IP spam scores. We provide:
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- Unlimited bandwidth.
- User/Pass or IP Auth.
- No DNS Leak.
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Secure proxies can help you maintain a clean IP reputation and avoid association with spam activities.
