Is My Domain On An Email Blacklist
In the section above we covered how to determine whether your email address is blacklisted. If your domain name has been blacklisted, you will notice many of the same changes take place. You may also get a notice from your hosting company warning you of the violation or even suspending your account.
Get Help From Trustworthy Websites
If you face difficulty in checking if your website is blacklisted by Google, there is no need to worry. There are many websites on the internet that have great security and scanning tools that will scan your website and inform you about any malicious content or harmful and spam links.
These websites will even search the Google blacklist and other blacklists over the web and inform you if your website is on any of these lists. You will even get assistance in removing the malware, making your site secure again, and getting out of the Google blacklist as soon as possible.
How To Remove Your Domain From A Blacklist
If your email domain spam score is high and your domain is blacklisted by any service, it can take several days to weeks to restore your reputation. Typically, the process of restoring is automated. If no emails identified as spam are sent from your domain within 2-3 weeks, your address will most likely be removed from the blacklist.
You can speed the procedure by contacting the corresponding service support. For example, Spamhouse offers a link to a removal request if your website is found listed in the DBL . To submit it, you need to fill the form and enter your domain and corporate email address. Public addresses in Gmail, Outlook or other email clients are not accepted. If your request is approved, youll be notified at the specified address.
Create & send automated bulk and transactional emails
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Check If Your Email Domain Is Blacklisted: Heres What To Do About It
When an email server is suspected of sending out spam, email service providers begin blacklisting either its IP or its domain. Once an IP address or domain is blacklisted, emails originating from it will end up in the spam folder rather than in the recipients inbox. Getting an IP blacklisted can be extremely damaging to email marketing, but there are ways you can avoid the blacklist database.
This guide will cover how to run an IP blacklist check, and more importantly, the blacklist-removal process to restore healthy email deliverability.
Note: the terms blacklist and blocklist are used interchangeably following an industry trend moving away from using blacklist.
What Is A Dnsbl
DNSBL stands for Domain Name System Blacklist, is the blacklist that allows the administrator to block the messages from specific IP that has a history of sending spam messages. The list is based on Internet’s Domain Name System, which converts the IP address into the domain name, and makes it much easier to understand.
Suppose a maintainer of a blacklist in the past has received any spam from a specific domain. It would include that server in its blacklist. All the messages sent from that particular server would either be rejected/flagged by all the websites that use that blacklist to avoid spam. DNSBL is the first line of defense.
There are dozens of DNSBLs available online, and each one has its own set of rules and offensive categories to focus on. The most common nasty type is spam, but some blacklists focus more on hacking, malware, botnets, etc. The email administrators use these DNSBLs to check if the incoming email is generated or originated from the blacklisted IP address or not.
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How To Blacklist/block Sender Domain Or An Email Address On Exchange
Exchange Server allows you to block emails from the unwanted sender domains or certain email addresses. This allows you to configure extra spam protection , if some spam mail outs are pass through your anti-spam system.An Exchange administrator can block the delivery of emails sent from the certain external domains or addresses to the user mailboxes using ECP graphical interface or PowerShell .
How To Use The Ip Blacklist Check Or Email Blacklist Check To Check Your Ip Status
The process is quite simple.
- The tool gives you two options. Either enter the domain’s IP or Email-IP to check its status.
- It checks in the 50+ blacklist databases to identify either it is blacklisted or not.
- It will take 20 to 40 seconds to perform the IP blacklist lookup. If your provided IP is listed in the particular blacklist, it will show “Yes” in front of that blacklist or vice-versa.
Why all my emails are moving to the user’s spam folder? Is it due to the IP blacklist?
If your IP or domain is already in a blacklisted database, your message will most likely land in the user’s spam folder without being scanned. Or maybe the user to whom you are sending the emails already spammed you.
But if your IP or domain is in a repetitive spam sender list. The ISP’s spam filters will reject that message, that it will not allow that message to reach the user’s spam folder.
Which blacklists matter?
Not all the blacklist matters. But it would be best if you cared about the following blacklists. These are the most used and most trusted ones.
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How Can You Remove Yourself From A Blacklist
Obviously, if you do find yourself on the IP blacklist, you need to get yourself off the list.
To get unblacklisted, you must first ask yourself: Why is my domain blacklisted? and determine what happened to get you blacklisted. It could be, for example, that youre failing SPF or DMARC authentication, and consequently, your emails appear to be suspicious.
From there, you need to go to the blacklisting site and ask them to be removed. Some offer a self-service removal tool and others require you to go through a removal process regardless, if you havent already fixed your email deliverability problems, youre likely to get blacklisted again soon after.
If you are a Salesforce CRM customer, you can monitor whether your IP address is blacklisted using the MassMailer Email Monitor. MassMailer will also help you improve your email deliverability, by generating your email deliverability score, so you can avoid getting blacklisted again.
Another Option To Consider
If your marketing team is sending permission-based email campaigns and/or wants to automate your emails with autoresponders or trigger campaigns, consider using an email service provider like Pinpointe. We deal with all this blacklist stuff 24×7 so you dont have to. We maintain one of the highest inbox delivery rates for customers. We monitor email delivery on an ongoing, real-time basis and ensure that youre opt-in emails wont get blocked. You can sign up for a free trial any time. Request a free trial or schedule a demo.
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Blacklist Monitor The Automatic Blacklist Checking
At EmailAcademy, we intend to create excellent tools that help entrepreneurs worldwide improve their email marketing. Checking your IP reputation every day is critical in email marketing, but to be honest, no one has the time to do that manually every day.
Blacklist Monitor is a tool that can check your IPs once every 2 hours and send you notifications.
How To Avoid Getting Email Blacklisted
If youre wondering how to avoid email blacklist trouble, there are a few things that you can do
- Be sure that your server is properly secured.
- Do not manually send bulk emails!
- If you send out a newsletter, use a newsletter program and be sure that every email address on your list is double-opt-in.
- Even when your email newsletter subscribers are double-opt-in addresses, ALWAYS include an unsubscribe link on every newsletter you send.
- Never misuse email addresses that you have been trusted with via a double-opt-in process.
- Frequently check your email subscribers to ensure that those on your list still wish to be on your list.
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How Does Email Blacklisting Work
Wondering how email blacklists work?
Internet service providers and email services use programs to monitor their services. When an anomaly is picked up by the program for example, your email address has just sent a spike of 200 emails in one hour the program adds your IP or your domain to a designated blacklist so that you cannot continue what is suspected as suspicious activity.
How To Check If Your Domain Is On A Spam Blacklist
The worst nightmare of an email marketer is to find themselves on a blacklist. Unfortunately, even if you run clean marketing with a subscriber base collected legally, your domains IP address can still get blacklisted.
The good news, however, is that the problem can be fixed. More importantly, you can avoid it in the first place by regularly validating your contact list. The topic is complex and might be overwhelming, so Id recommend first checking what Brian Minick, COO of ZeroBounce Email Validator , has to say about maintaining a healthy contact base hygiene.
Next thing you need is a domain spam check: see whether your website is currently on the list. There are a number of services you can use to do it:
- UltraTools, etc.
For example, in Spamhaus, go to Blocklist Removal Center > Domain Lookup Tool and enter your domains name. Youll get instant result.
You may use other services. The procedure will be the same.
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What To Do If You Are On A Blacklist And How To Get Off One
Assuming that you are not actually a spammer and that you have been following the email marketing best practices, it can be very frustrating and damaging to your business if you are unable to send emails.
Blacklists are useful to protect people from harmful or non-relevant content. But they are not perfect. Even if you are on one, do not be alarmed because, usually, you are removed after some time and there are no effects afterwards.
If your domain is on a smaller blacklist, then it will probably not affect your cold outreach because few ISPs use it. In that case, you do not have to worry because your IP will be excluded sooner or later. On the other hand, larger lists are commonly used by ISPs which can impact your inboxing rates.
So, to remove your domain/IP address from those blacklists, it can be as simple as contacting its owner and requesting to be removed. The major blacklist companies have information on their sites on how you can remove yourself from their lists. Usually, the process is straightforward.
However, some blacklist operators may ask that you prove to them that you have improved your email marketing practices and corrected the reasons you were first blacklisted for.
Finally, to avoid getting onto other blacklists in the future, make sure to follow our guidelines from this post.
How To Avoid An Email Domain Blacklist And Remove Your Ip From One
At hubsell, I advise customers to avoid spammy outreach behaviour to not get yourself into an email domain blacklist. There are several ways to minimize the chances of getting into that position. For example, sending messages at a human level pace.
Unfortunately, there are salespeople that do not know of all the guidelines. So, in this post, I want to share with you what is an email domain blacklist and its different types. Also, you may be asking yourself, is my ip blacklisted. So, I will explain what can cause your domain to get blacklisted and what to do in that case.
Before I start breaking down each topic, here is the list of them for reference:
What is a blacklist and its effect on inboxing
Different types of blacklists and examples
- IP address-based
- identical emails with no personalisation
- spam sending rates and volumes
How to avoid getting onto a blacklist
How to know if you are on an email blacklist
What to do if you are on a blacklist and how to get off one
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Signs Of Your Email Domain Is Blacklisted
Verify domain blacklisting regularly is crucial. However, how often should you check the blacklist domain? How regular is regular?
It is highly recommended to conduct domain blacklist tests at least twice a month when everything goes smoothly. However, some situations require prompt actions. For example, one of the first signs of getting yourself on the domain blacklist is getting poor responses from your email campaign. These includes:
- a sudden drop in open rates
If you notice something of that, then it is highly recommended to verify domain blacklisting.
Besides, you can examine server logs that may also give you some first signs of problems with your domain.
What Does Being Blacklisted Mean For Your Email Campaigns
However, there are hundreds of blocklists, and not all of them have the same impact on email programs. So rather than panicking if your IP or domain pops up on any blocklist, check if it is an important blocklist and determine if your performance metrics are impacted.
number of hits per day on Validitys trap network, the largest publicly available commercial trap network in the world
Types of public blocklists
IP-based blocklists are used by mailbox providers to identify which IP addresses are sending spam or other bad mail, such as malware infectors, virus and botnet distributors, to their receivers.
Domain-based blocklists utilize the senders domain names to create lists of domains associated with spam. These domains arent necessarily sending spam to receivers, but they were found to be using bad practices associated with spam attempts. Make sure to follow email best practices when creating email campaigns.
Not all blocklists are created equal. Some blocklists have a bigger impact on performance.
If youre blocklisted, there are steps you can take to address mitigating factors that led to your IP or domain being blocklisted. Temporarily stop your email campaigns and figure out exactly how and why this happened. If youre on a critical blocklist, like Spamhaus, follow their delisting process. Read more about this process and blacklist prevention here.
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Lets Start With Dnsbls/rbls
If youve been experiencing low email delivery and open rates, theres a good chance that your IP or sending domain got included in one of the Domain Name System Blacklists , earlier called Real-time Blackhole Lists These global blocklist databases maintain the reputation of domains and IP addresses. Among the 100+ global blocklists, 30 are highly important, and the others act as an early warning system. So, while you should be concerned about the 30 blocklists, you should also keep track of the others.
This article talks about the top email blocklist checker tools that run a health check on your email sending domain or IP address.