• Jul232009

    Your email address and blacklists

    Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

    BlacklistSomething I get asked a lot, since we have two email messaging products (swiftpress.com and our enterprise version of swiftpress) is: I’m sending emails to my list but they aren’t being delivered. Deliver-ability from your email messaging system provider is one thing, with swiftpress we have pretty good deliver-ability but it’s not just on our end of the server. It comes down to your domain name’s email history too.

    What are DNS blacklists and blocklists? According to blacklistmonitor.com:

    A dns blacklist or blocklist is a database containing known internet addresses (or IPs) used by individuals or companies sending spam. Various ISP’s and bandwidth providers subscribe to these DNS blacklist databases to filter out spam sent across their network or to their subscribers.

    I won’t go into what you should do to keep off of a blacklist or maybe even how you got on one, that’s for another post, but for now let’s assume you just want to check.

    Step 1 Find out what your IP address is:
    You can do this by going to network-tools.com or dnsstuff.com and running a “Ping” look up by copying and pasting in your domain name.

    Step 2 check the blacklists:
    Now head on over to a couple of the blacklist services and check to see if you’re on there.

    SpamCop
    SpamHaus
    Delivery Watch
    MXToolBox
    DNS Stuff
    EmailReach
    RepCheck
    Blacklistedip
    Blacklist.ie
    Blacklist Check

    If you see your IP show up in any of these lists, chances are you’ve been sending emails to honeypot email addresses. That is email addresses that are setup specifically for the purpose of catching you sending unsolicited emails. It’s a trap…

    You then will need to petition the blacklist organization to get off of said list, if that fails we can then get involved to start tracking down specific ISPs that are blocking your email delivery and try to negotiate a way to get your messaging through. All in all, it’s a hard road to travel down. If you even suspect your list isn’t 100% quality you need to talk to us about it before you use it, I promise we won’t yell at you. We can help keep you out of trouble and it’s much easier to do that before you send, once you’ve sent to a suspect list you can’t take it back.

Contact

1207 Lincoln Street
Columbia, SC 29201
803.588.9310 Phone
877.415.4259 Fax
info@period-three.com

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