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A few versions ago I had replaced it with a link to whatismyipaddress.com/ip/{ip}. However, this change is only applied to new installations, not to existing sites. One way to apply this new setting is to go to the Logging & Reporting tab, clear out the IP Lookup Service field and click on Save & Close. This will apply the new default.

As to why the new default isn't applied automatically: ip-lookup.net is only intermittently down. Most people haven't seen the problem at all. Writing migration code is always risky. There is always an edge case you can't think of. So, when I do the risk analysis it tells me that writing migration code for it is probably not the best of ideas.

If you would read again my reply you'd see that I understand you very well, I told you what I have already done, and gave you instructions to address the issue on your installation.

For the sake of completeness, let me explicitly state that the email template uses the variable {LOOKUP} as the IP lookup link. The contents of the {LOOKUP} variable are replaced by the contents of aforementioned "IP Lookup Service" option replacing the lowercase {ip} in it with the visitor's IP address as documented in https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/admin-tools-joomla/web-application-firewall.html#waf-configure-logging-reporting.

Here's a short history of IP lookup and email templates over the past 15 years this software has existed:

I introduced the concept of IP lookups only as a button in the Exceptions Log (what is now called Blocked Requests Log) and the Auto IP Ban pages in Admin Tools 2.1.3, released on July 17th, 2011.

Having an IP lookup link in the blocked request email (then called the "security exception email") was introduced in Admin Tools 2.1.11, released on November 1st, 2011. Emails were text-only, their content provided as language strings. The IP lookup in the email was, however, implemented as a variable in square brackets ([LOOKUP]) following the convention I had introduced with Akeeba Backup's emails using dynamic content.

Being able to customize the IP lookup service yourself with the "IP Lookup Service" option instead of having a hardcoded IP lookup service was introduced in Admin Tools 2.2.6, released on May 26th, 2012. The reason was that some people complained the ip-lookup.net service was unreliable for them, though by the time I made the release these complaints had stopped.

Having email templates supporting all preexisting variables (including [LOOKUP]) for all emails sent by Admin Tools was introduced in Admin Tools 3.0.0, released on May 6th, 2014. This was implemented with our own email templates feature. Emails were now sent as HTML.

I switched to Joomla's then-new Mail Templates feature for these emails in Admin Tools 7.0.0, released on August 7th, 2021. The variables changed from using square brackets to braces (e.g. [LOOKUP] to {LOOKUP}) because that's how Joomla 4's Mail Templates feature supported variables.

The default IP lookup service changed from ip-lookup.net to whatismyipaddress.com in version 7.7.1 released April 3rd, 2025.

Sigh, blame Joomla for that… When you uninstall an extension it does NOT remove the Mail Templates linked to that extension. Therefore, uninstalling and reinstalling has absolutely no effect whatsoever on Mail Templates.

That said, the only problem I see with past mail templates is that between 7.0.0 (August 2021) and 7.2.3 (February 2023) it was using the wrong variable (IPLOOKUP instead of LOOKUP). There was never an extra parenthesis. The only thing I can think of is that you are being displayed the text-only version of the email which reads:

IP Address: {IP} (IP Lookup: {LOOKUP})

When the IP and LOOKUP variables are replaced you end up with something like

IP Address: 192.0.2.1 (IP Lookup: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/192.0.2.1)

Depending on your mail client, it might misinterpret the closing parenthesis as part of the URI. However, the purpose of a text-only email is that you will copy the link yourself.

Moreover, the link in the HTML email does not contain any parentheses as these are outside the anchor (A) element, let alone its HREF attribute.

Further to that, I am pretty sure that Install Or Update didn't actually do anything about it, as it only replaces missing email templates. The template wasn't missing, you were already receiving email. May you clicked Reset which removes all installed email templates for the extension and then reinstalls the latest version of the mail templates. But this also doesn't make sense to me as the location of the parentheses doesn't change. It actually hasn't changed since version 3.0.0 well over a decade ago.

Which leaves us with the only possibility. In the past, you had accidentally configured Joomla's Mail Templates to only send text emails, and now that you started going through them to troubleshoot this issue you are sending both text and HTML in the same email. This makes your mail client prioritize the HTML version of the email which shows you the correct link since there's a well-defined A element with an HREF attribute containing the lookup URL.

Now, why would Joomla default to text only emails, especially when they decided to add an email template feature which converts the text-only email to HTML anyway? BEATS ME! It makes no sense whatsoever. It confused the crap out of me for the ~15 minutes it took me to understand why my emails were all wonky all of a sudden, fortunately during a beta release so I had time to adjust my production sites.