“Wait…What?!? Hey, I can’t send or receive any email!” Has this ever happened to your company? If so, then your IP address has been blacklisted by other mail servers because they think your email address and/or domain is spamming. When this happens, everyone you try to send email to that uses that mail server bounces your email back to you. If an email and/or website gets hacked into, the hacker can use it to send out spam email messages; hundreds, thousands, even millions (if it not caught for a while) of spam emails . Other mail servers see all these emails and label your email address, domain and your IP address as a spammer. This is a BIG reason to have secure passwords on both websites and emails.
Many companies use popular third party email marketing tools such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and Vertical Response to send monthly newsletters and other messages to their clients. These applications are great for flying under the radar of spam filters. However they can become problematic if the user never views the email reports, where you can view bounced emails. If this list of emails builds up and these non-existent email addresses are never deleted, this can cause the mail server filters to label you as a spammer as well. This will also eventually cause you to get blacklisted.
If this happens to you, you can take action to resolve the situation and be white-listed (de-listed) once more. If your Domain Name or IP Address is blacklisted at any ISP, you need to send them a request to be removed from their blacklist. Find the correct contact info online to your specific ISP and follow their URL links to apply for white-listing using their online form. Next, you’ll want to be sure that you contact each of the people whose email addresses showed up on the list of errors (bounced mail, nonexistent address, etc.) and get the correct information entered into your system.
We’ve listed some of the common ISP’s with a couple of quick tips for what to do with each one.
Gmail:
First, go to the following link and read Gmail’s Bulk Senders Guidelines: http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html
The next URL is where you fill out and submit Gmail’s Bulk Sender Contact Form: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=bulk_send&hl=en
Hotmail:
The Hotmail bulk sender form can be found here: https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl&ct=eformts
Roadrunner:
Info on how to be removed from Roadrunner’s blacklist can be found here:
http://security.rr.com/mail_blocks.htm
Follow this URL to find out if you’ve been blacklisted: http://security.rr.com/cgi-bin/block-lookup
Yahoo:
This URL is for Yahoo’s bulk sender application form: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html
AOL.com:
If you have been blacklisted, visit AOL Postmaster and open a Postmaster Support Request to be removed from their blacklist.
The following two URL’s can be used to check the status of your IP address:
http://www.barracudacentral.org/lookups
http://dnsbl.invaluement.com/lookup/
Being blacklisted is not the end of the world but it can put a major kink in your daily operations, as well as that of your clients. So pay attention to those email reports if you are using a email marketing application, make sure your passwords are secure and pay attention to any unusual activity with your emails.