IP Warm-Up and Sender Reputation Repair for Live Programs

Moving a Gmail domain reputation out of Bad takes four to eight weeks of clean sending, and there is no shorter path that survives. Anyone quoting ten days is planning to move you to a new domain, which resets the score and keeps the cause. We will not do that, and if that is the engagement you want, stop here. When a dedicated IP is the wrong answer: Below roughly 100,000 messages a month sustained, a dedicated IP gives receivers too little signal to form an opinion, and you will place worse than you would in your ESP's shared pool. We say this before selling a warm-up, and often the recommendation is to stay shared and fix the list instead. Volume that arrives in bursts around Black Friday does not count as sustained. How the ramp actually runs: We start from the segment that opened or clicked in the last 30 days, not from the list. Volume steps up only when the previous step held: hard bounces under 2 percent, complaints under 0.1 percent, and no growth in 4xx deferrals. Each mailbox provider gets its own track, because they do not move at the same speed. Gmail forms an opinion quickly and forgives slowly. Microsoft throttles at the connection and tells you almost nothing. And in Italy the consumer domains that matter — libero.it, virgilio.it, alice.it, tiscali.it, tim.it — sit behind Italiaonline infrastructure with filtering behaviour that has no relationship to what Gmail is doing to the same send. A ramp built only against Gmail data will stall on Italian consumer traffic and the client will not know why. Reading the rejections: Most of the diagnostic value is in the SMTP responses your ESP dashboard summarises into a percentage. We read them raw: Gmail 421-4.7.28 rate limiting against 550-5.7.1 policy blocks, Microsoft S3150 and OutboundSpamException, and the difference between a deferral that clears on retry and one that will never clear. Blocklists, honestly: Spamhaus CSS is automated and resolves when the sending pattern changes; SBL is manual and needs a request with evidence attached. PBL is irrelevant if you are relaying properly. UCEPROTECT level 2 and level 3 list you for your neighbours and we do not pay them, because major receivers do not consult them. If a vendor has offered you a SORBS delisting, note that Proofpoint shut SORBS down in June 2024 — they are selling you nothing. What repair actually consists of: Suppression, not throttling. We cut the inactive segment, set a sunset policy the business will keep, hold sending to the engaged core while reputation rebuilds, and only then reopen volume. Throttling a bad list slowly delivers a bad list. Not included: ESP selection or migration. Template and content work. Copywriting. Any promise about a specific Postmaster Tools score by a specific date — the receivers do not publish the function and neither will we. Who this is not for: Anyone who acquired the list through purchase, co-registration or a sweepstake, where the complaint rate is structural and no ramp will fix it. Anyone under a launch deadline that assumes ten days. Anyone unwilling to remove subscribers, which is the only lever that reliably works and the only one that meets resistance internally every single time.