Ngl my side project's.xyz gets like 40% bounce rate on cold outreach. Switched to.com on same VPS, same IP, same SPF/DKIM — drops to 8%. Is this just me or is.xyz fully blacklisted by Gmail now?
Running inference on this: either TLD reputation is real or my sample is trash. VRAM-light problem but annoying.
Same box, same /24, only variable was domain. Thoughts?
It is not the TLD
Member
Fun little project: I tested this on my NAT VPS with Hostinger
echo test | swaks --to gmail.com --from [email protected]
echo test | swaks --to gmail.com --from [email protected]Both landed in spam. It actually works — the IP was the problem, not the TLD.
Shared /24 with a bulletproof hoster. Whole range warm.
Member
Right then, proper confession time — we had a customer on a /24 that got RBL'd because their "newsletter" was sending 50k emails a day to purchased lists. Took down three other lads on the same range.
Cheers lads, check your neighbor's reputation before blaming your TLD.
More importantly: did you test your email deliverability before you needed it? Here is my checklist:
Remember the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two media, one offsite. Your domain reputation deserves the same care.
Same IP same VPS and you blame the TLD? I don't buy it
Fair enough. But I did say same /24, not same IP — and tomchan's test showed the whole range was warm. My .com is on a different /24 now. Should've been clearer about that.
Still, the bounce rate gap was real. Maybe it's not "blacklisted" but there's a gradient of suspicion?
Member
That's the question, isn't it. TLD reputation vs IP reputation vs domain age. My .xyz and .com were both fresh, both on the same warm IP, both spamboxed. So in my case TLD didn't matter.
But cold outreach is different from transactional. You're sending to strangers who might hit "report spam." That feeds back differently.
This is why I keep logs. Not just of the send, but of the entire chain — IP history, previous domains on that /24, RBL timestamps. You can't debug what you didn't record.
My .com on DigitalOcean has been clean for three years. My .xyz on a budget host lasted six months before I moved it. Correlation? Sure. Causation? I keep backups, not conclusions.
Following.