You’ve Been Blacklisted – Now What?
When applied to email marketing, a blacklist a list of IP addresses or domains that have been spotted sending spam.There are private and public blacklists.
If you have added an address or domain to the blacklist in your email program or on your mail server, letters from this sender will no longer end up in your mailbox.Many large companies have their own black and white mailing lists. The maximum that a private blacklist threatens is non-delivery of letters to a specific domain. Such issues can be easily resolved in correspondence with the mail server administrator. These are called private blacklists.
The public blacklists are much more dangerous. Public, open blacklists are used by many mail providers and spam filters.If a domain or IP-address falls on such a list, letters can be blocked on a large subset of addresses from your list. For example, if you get into the SpamHaus blacklist, all emails on the domains hotmail, live, outlook, msn and, according to our observations, 20% of emails on gmail will be rejected.
Reasons for getting into blacklists
I’m sure that very often you are faced with getting IP addresses and domains in various black lists. Why is this happening?
Getting into the blacklist occurs due to a decrease in the sender's reputation (IP address or domain).
For example.
The client sends mailings to his list of addresses, which he has been collecting for several years. Naturally, there are people among his addressees who actively read his letters and buy goods.But there are those who got on the list thanks to the purchase of some product a year ago, and they are no longer interested in the client's products. These addressees do not open letters, do not unsubscribe from them, but simply delete (or even do not delete).Some time passes, and the client gets into the blacklist. Why?
Often inactive addresses, which the user does not enter, become spam traps of the mail provider or some kind of anti-spam service. This address may continue to receive your letters, but it does not react to these letters in any way, does not read them or unsubscribe. Sometime later (six months or a year) after the real owner of the box stopped entering it, such a box becomes a trap.
When the client's next letter arrives at this mailbox, the spam service already considers that this letter was sent to a spam trap. And it adds this sender to its blacklist. It instantly spreads to all servers that use this blacklist when receiving mail.
There are two other similar situations that can lead to being blacklisted.
The first situation is when you took the address on the site of your future client, or wrote it down in a paper form, and then send mailing to this address.
The second situation is when the address subscribed through the form on your site, but you do not have confirmation of the subscription through Double Opt-In.
The situations are similar. Your list contains addresses that you don't know anything about. Is the address spelled correctly on paper? Is the address on the website correct? Did the owner himself sign his mailbox through the form on your website? Trap addresses are often specially placed on sites to discourage mailing lists of those who use auto-collecting addresses.This is a very acute problem today, affecting many clients. Some email providers specifically run their robots to subscribe to any forms they find on the Internet. Then they keep track of which mailings they receive.
According to the rules of email newsletters, you must ask to confirm your subscription with the first letter. If you just start sending out emails, chances are high that you will end up on the blacklist. The company that blacklisted you will have every reason not to remove you from there.
How to get out of the blacklist?
Let's say you are blacklisted.How do you know what you hit? If you are the owner of the service, a letter will be sent to the mail. Or it can be understood by the log in the server response. For example, Hotmail can respond like this when an address hits the spam house blocklist:
554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [IP_ADDRESS] blocked using zen.dnsbl;
What will we do?
First, make all the necessary changes to the mailings to prevent them from being blacklisted again. If all is well, then we will proceed with the removal from the blacklist.
Why is it necessary that all requirements are met?
Very often the first removal from the blacklist is very easy to do. Companies are sympathetic to such problems and remove the sender from the blacklist. But if the sender gets into the blacklist again and again, this is fraught with the fact that the anti-spam service will refuse to remove your address from its blacklist. Then deliverability will suffer greatly.
Let's figure out how to remove an address from the SpamHaus blacklist. This is one of the most serious blacklists and impacts shipping across multiple domains.Go to SpamHaus Blocklist Removal Center and enter your IP address or domain in the field. You can find out what exactly was blocked by looking at the delivery logs. Also, if you are the owner of a domain or IP address, you will receive a blocking notification.Here we can see that there was an IP blocking. SpamHaus reports that there has been unauthorized bulk mailing to unverified email addresses.
SpamHaus gives recommendations on what the sender should do to avoid being blacklisted:
- Use captcha to prevent robots from signing up.
- Use double opt-in registration to prevent unwanted subscriptions.
- Read the rules of mass mailings that SpamHaus provides
SpamHaus offers to send a letter to their team and explain exactly what happened, what actions were taken in order to solve the problem.After sending the letter, within 24 hours the SpamHaus team responds and reports either that the address has been removed from the blacklist, or that additional information is needed.
Checklist "How not to be blacklisted"
First. Be sure to use Double Opt-In.This way you will avoid unnecessary subscriptions and registrations of robots on your site. There are such cases when a client was blacklisted because an anti-spam service robot subscribed to his mailing list, and the client did not have a mailing confirmation letter configured.
Second. Don't send emails to people who don't read them.We know the pain of removing addresses from the list. After all, every address is your potential client.If the addressee hasn't read one of your letters, it's okay. If he hasn't read the letter for a month, maybe he went on vacation. But if not a single letter has been read in 3 months or six months, then delete such an address from your database. He will not make you money. But because of it, you can get blacklisted.As said, inactive addresses can become spam traps. If there are any on your list, it can cause serious damage to your reputation.Removing inactive subscribers is very useful, and not just for deliverability.
Third - Confirm the newsletter in the first letter. If you are just starting to make mailings, and the addresses have been collected for a long time, ask the recipients to confirm by the first letter that they want to receive your mailing. Otherwise, it is possible that you will send messages to robots.
Fourth - Captcha. It is advisable to add a captcha to your subscription form to avoid unnecessary robot subscriptions.