What Is an Email Blacklist?

Are your emails not reaching your customers? It could be because your domain or IP address has been blocked! Yes, email blacklisting is a thing.

Each time you send an email, the receiver’s server is able to check your profile. The purpose of this test is to determine who you really are and if you are trustworthy.

If the credibility of the IP address or domain has been damaged, and there have been numerous complaints regarding emailing spam, or the address is not in the DMARC policies, the emails you send will land in the spam folder or aren’t able to reach the sender even once. In this article, we’ll discuss what an email blacklist is.

What Is an Email Blacklist?

A blacklist of email addresses is a list of IP addresses and domains which are blocked due to suspicion of sending spam. The goal of this list is to limit the number of unwelcome emails sent out to users. However, you can overpass this if you buy email hosting.

A blacklist of email addresses may be public or private:

Privacy: Most major ISPs, including Gmail and Microsoft, have blacklists within their internal systems that are managed privately. If you are on the list, you will not even know it’s there until you start receiving the bounce.

Public: Contrary to private lists, it is possible to check whether your email address is on a public blacklist and rectify any problems prior to when you begin sending emails.

How a User Gets Blacklisted?

There are a variety of ways to be placed on a blacklist for email:

• Not getting enough spam complaints from the recipients.
• For sending emails to untrusted addresses.
• The purchase of mail lists.
• The trap of spam.
• Making use of ESPs similar to Gmail for bulk emailing.
• It is not a good idea to send too many emails all at once.
• Not using the correct DNS configuration.

If you can identify yourself as a victim of one or more of these situations and you’re not shocked when you notice that your email messages aren’t reaching your existing or future clients. Don’t undervalue the difficulty.

Certain service providers have specifically launched robots that sign up to forms that they discover through the Internet and then verify which messages they have received. The Blacklist firms have their own distinct methods for identifying scammers; however, they generally use the same mixture of information on complaints about spam as well as scams. And when you buy an email hosting, you opt-in to the same system.

Spam Email Complaints

Spam emails are utilized to determine if senders are responsible for sending large quantities of emails. If the rate of complaints is very high, then an IP address or domain will likely get listed on the blacklist.

To stop this from happening, it is important to ensure that mailers are only sent to addresses that are most interested in your message.

Spam Traps

Spam traps look similar to authentic email addresses but don’t correspond to actual individuals. They are used to identify the source of mailers. They are spread across various sites.

There are two types of spam:

Pure spam traps have never ever been employed by anyone else and have not signed up for any email. They’re placed on contact pages, forums, and other pages. They have one goal to catch people who are spammers and collect email addresses through email parsers. Every message that is delivered to spam traps is instantly classified as spam.

Recycled spam traps include addresses previously used by normal users but were then aborted and eventually went into inactivity. After a time of inactivity (depending upon the service provider), this address is removed from the system and transformed into a spam trap. If you try to send an email to this address, then it will bounce.

For instance, with Yahoo, this time frame is approximately one year. In other companies, the time frame might be different.

Being caught in this kind of spam can have a lesser detrimental effect. It is nevertheless a risk and can negatively impact your credibility generally since it can signal to the provider that you aren’t monitoring the integrity of your database mailers when you mail emails to unregistered mailboxes.

What Should You Do if Being Placed on the Blacklist?

The first step is to not be worried. There are numerous blacklists across the world, and there’s a good chance that your IP address appears on at least one. Most of the time, it won’t affect your chances of reaching your clients in a significant way. That is one way to check if your email domain is blacklisted. Blacklists with smaller blacklists are more likely to be utilized by the big ISPs as well, so your email addresses will likely disappear quite quickly.

If you’re being blacklisted is an indication of something not working properly in your marketing emails. Larger lists utilized by ISPs may have an even greater effect on the way your email is distributed and also your company as well.

If your IP address has been flagged as being placed on a blacklist, then you’ll have to notify the blacklist to request removal. Every large blacklist organization has information on their websites on ways to get removed from their list. The process is generally easy and simple; you just need to ensure you do what they request to get rid of your list of emails. If you have smaller lists, and you still send emails and have not encountered a large number of spam-related complaints, your IP address will disappear by itself.

If you’re sending mail through an email service provider or you just want to buy email hosting, they’ll inform you of what steps you must take to correct the issue in your lists and emails. They’ll notify the individuals that manage the blacklists in order to remove their IP addresses in order to enable them to send. You may also find that your account is blocked until you clean your blacklists.

What Can You Do to Avoid Being on Blacklists?

One of the best things to do with your email marketing is to stay clear of getting on the blacklist at all costs. As we said, emails and lists are major reasons behind being blacklisted. This is how you can stay clear of blacklists:

Content for emails: The content you provide to the email recipients keeps them engaged and interested in your emails. If you’re distributing mass emails to all of your subscribers in your database, you may receive complaints about your spam. You must ensure that you’re sending exactly what the people on your list expect from you. You should also keep your information interesting for your subscribers by personalizing your emails and the contents. Alongside your content, you should be cognizant of when you’re sending emails. If you start to send emails to massive lists or raise the frequency, you may have issues when it comes to delivery.

Check the stats of your email campaigns: Most likely, you’re monitoring the number of clicks and opens, but be sure to keep track of domain open also. If you notice that opens are dropping drastically in a particular domain, you need to check the status of your blacklist.

Never purchase any email lists: These addresses are, at minimum, dated, and in the worst case, it’s spam traps. There are more complaints about spam and delivery problems than you receive business from, which is why it’s not a good idea. Keep your lists clean by eliminating bounced addresses or those which are not functioning. If someone hasn’t checked your mail in the past few days, it’s possible to delete them from your list.

Separate your lists to ensure that your email recipients receive what they require from your marketing emails, and break your lists into different segments. These could include lists that are based on which area your customers reside and what kind of items they shop for or on the things they are interested in. It will be easy to deliver an appropriate email to each of your customers.

Since you buy an Email hosting service you need to add account for each of you team members. If you are looking for a guide to see how to create your email accounts, check How to Create Email Account in cPanel article.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed what is an email blacklist. The blacklists don’t exist to hinder your work. However, they can help ensure that there’s absolutely no abuse in sending emails to a large number of people. Make sure to provide your customers with quality material and avoid flooding your inbox with emails from people who aren’t signed up to sign up. If you follow the rules of the letter while not ignoring the law, your name isn’t likely to be damaged.