TMCnews Featured Article

The ARIN (News - Alert), or American Agency for Internet Numbers, has directly allocated about 4.096 portable and virgin IPv4 addresses to SMTP, Inc. A world leader in the email delivery service industry for transactional email and permission-based marketing, SMTP’s latest win comes as no surprise.

The last remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses were allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority on the 3rd of February, 2011. The recipients of the large blocks included the local registries as well as the North American ARIN. The Asia/Pacific local registry, APNIC, reached the 3rd stage in address exhaustion on the 14th of April, 2011. This prompted a limit of IP allocations policy that set a hard line of 1,024 addresses only. There is no significant proof of when the IP address pool of the North American market will be depleted, although experts in the industry say the time is not too far away.

In a release, CEO and Chairman of SMTP, Semyon Dukach said that “The entire process for successfully delivering email through the Internet is dependent on IP addresses, and the associated reputation of those addresses for sending legitimate email that isn't spam. More and more of our customers are requesting their own dedicated IPs, while ISPs are experiencing a growing IP address shortage. As a result it has become critical for us to have direct control over a sufficient supply of IP addresses to accommodate our growth."

Dukach also said that “IP reputation is the single most important factor in determining whether outbound email ends up in the inbox or in the spam folder. When a new IP is requested from an ISP it has often been used for sending email in the past, with dubious effects on its reputation. On the other hand, with this new direct allocation of 4,096 virgin IPs from ARIN, SMTP will be in a position to guarantee that our corporate customers can send their email over IPs never previously used by anyone else. In addition, only directly assigned portable IPs can be moved from one data center to another, assuring that our customers will never have to lose their earned IP reputation simply because we move our servers."