Stay Off Email Blacklists
As my father once said, "Son, it's a lot easier getting into things than out of things." Admittedly, that advice is taken out-of-context (my father was talking about dating), but the concept applies equally well to email blacklists. It's a lot easier to get on a blacklist than to get off of it.
Once you're on an Internet Service Provider's blacklist, your email to that domain (e.g., hotmail.com) will be automatically blocked (i.e., returned-to-sender) or blackholed (i.e., deleted without notification) regardless of the content or purpose of the email. Your intended recipients will be unaware that the email was ever sent.
Getting on the blacklist at one domain can have a domino effect at other domains, because many Internet Service Providers subscribe to third-party blacklists, in order to protect their users from unwanted spam.
To avoid getting blacklisted:
- Practice good "email list hygiene" by reviewing bounced, return-to-sender emails to remove addresses at Internet Service Providers that no longer exist, or never existed - so that you're not unnecessarily over-taxing the mail servers of the recipient email hosts.
- Make it easy to unsubscribe, and stop mailing to unsubscribes soon thereafter - so that your dissatisfied subscribers complain only to you and not to their Internet Service Providers.
- Avoid email content or frequency that offends recipients - so that your spam complaint rate remains below the threshold that would cause the Internet Service Provider to send all of your email directly to the junk mail folder (that's bad) or to blacklist your email entirely (that's worse).
- Before roll-outs, evaluate complaint rates from new single opt-in and opt-out email lists - so that one bad list source doesn't get all of your emails blacklisted.
- Don't mail from an IP address* that is shared, or was once used by an organization that sent spam email - so that your innocent mail is not blocked if an Internet Service Provider decides to block all mail sent from a particular IP address.
You can check your blacklist status right now at:
For automatic notifications of blacklist changes in the future, try a monitoring program such as Blacklist Monitor: http://www.blacklistmonitor.com/
* Note: "IP Address" is a fancy term that identifies the unique name of a computer. Each computer connected to the internet is given an Internet Protocol Address that consists of a series of numbers, such as "66.111.110.105." (Incidentally, 66.111.110.105 is the IP address of one of the web server computers at UnitedWay.org. To see this for yourself, type http://66.111.110.105 into an internet browser and press enter.)
Like web servers, mail servers connected to the internet are also given unique IP addresses. Sometimes, these mail servers are used for bulk email by only one organization. But smaller organizations often share a mail server to lower their email costs. Too often, this is false economy.
The trouble with mailing from a shared IP address is that you may be penalized for the company you keep. For instance, if just one company out of 100 using your IP address sends spam, all mail from that IP address (including your innocent email) may be blocked by recipient organizations that use blunt methods to avoid spam.
More subtly, mailing from a shared IP address may prevent your innocent bulk mail from getting whitelisted, because many Internet Service Providers can't or won't whitelist an entire IP address if it's used by multiple mailers.
Whether outsourcing your email operations, or handling bulk mail in-house, mail from a dedicated IP address. Note that IP addresses are often recycled from one webhosting client to another, so make sure that your IP address does not appear on a blacklist. Better still, try to mail from a virgin IP address that has never been used for email before.
