Why Is My Ip Address Blacklisted
A blacklist is a database of IP addresses that are believed to send spam. Emails from these IP addresses are either blocked or routed to the recipient’s spam folder or handled accordingly.
Your IP may be in a single blacklist or multiple backlists. There is no centralized authority for that. Each blacklist is managed independently, and each has its criteria for listing or delisting the IP address in its blacklist.
There are several reasons that your IP is on the blacklist.
What To Do When Your Emails Stop Hitting The Inbox
When all of a sudden you’re unable to deliver your emails, you’ll probably think of a blacklist. You’re still receiving emails, so there must be something wrong with outgoing email being blocked. But are you really on a blacklist? And if so, what caused you to end up there? Let’s take a look at how you’ve ended up on blacklists and how to get rid of them.
Richard van Looijen July 14, 2020 Latest update: March 29, 2021
Reasons Why Your Domain Can Be Blacklisted
If your domains DMARC record isnt in the strict alignment mode, campaigns can continue to be sent even after the daily limit is exceeded. But campaigns sent over the limit will be signed not by you but by your ESP.
If your DMARC policy isnt none, , youll be able to send only the amount of emails allowed for the current day of warmup. The rest might be rejected as messages that fail DMARC authentication.
In eSputnik, the warmup of the verified domain is automatically monitored. The system counts emails sent each day to commonly used domains such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, mail.ru, etc. It’s not allowed to send emails from unverified domains to Microsoft domains via eSputnik, as these clients strictly monitor the content of emails and users response. Content of bad quality worsens your domain reputation.
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How To Check If Youre On Microsofts Hosted Exchange Blacklist
Microsofts bigfish.com email filter is privately maintained, so youll likely discover that your emails are being blocked by Microsoft in 1 of 3 ways:
- A recipient actually reports to you that they are not receiving your email
- If your email is being blocked by recipients using Microsoft Hosted Exchange, your IT team will see a log entry in your email server logs that looks like this :
failed,5.7.1 smtp 550 5.7.1 Service unavailable Client host blocked using Blocklist 1, mail from IP banned To request removal from this list please forward this message to delist@messaging.microsoft.com and include your ip address xx.xx.xx.xx. mail.global.bigfish.com
- When you send an email and are being blocked, youll receive an NDR Non-Delivery-Report email similar to the following. Be sure to save it for your trusty IT folks, cuz theyll need this to resolve the issue:
Reporting-MTA: dns host.domain.com
Action: failedStatus: 5.5.0Diagnostic-Code: smtp 550 Service unavailable Client host blocked using Blocklist 1, mail from IP banned by global.bigfish.com To request removal from this list please forward this message to delist -at- messaging.microsoft.com and include your ip address xx.xx.xx.xx
NOTE: If youre having issues with Microsofts hosted Exchange and are seeing errors from 88.blocklist.zap in your email log files or NDR reports, check our related article about 88.blocklist.zap
Email Blacklists Is Your Email Blocked
We often get the question: How do I know if my company is on a SPAM Blacklist? Followed by If my company is on a SPAM blacklist, how the heck do we get unlisted?
There are over a hundred SPAM blacklists private corporate spam firewall and private blacklists, but luckily there are a few tools that can help you check most of them quickly. Weve included here a handy reference with the sites that you can use to check your blacklist status. Weve also highlighted several of the more prominent SPAM blacklists.
First and foremost well stress that our series on checking and removing your email servers from a blacklist assumes that youre not spamming and youve first taken appropriate corrective steps to clean up your email list and email marketing sending practices.
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Tools To Check If Youre Blacklisted Or Penalized
There are some handy online tools you can use to check if your WordPress site is blacklisted or penalized. The first is FEs Website Penalty Indicator tool. This helps you see your traffic overlaid with algorithm updates.
Another similiar tool is Barracuda Digitals Panguin Tool.
The best way to keep track of changes or get more information on your domain is to use the tools created by Google. In this, should be your go-to tool!
Google Search Console shows you the number of indexed pages, backlinks to your site, search queries, site health, 404 not found pages, server errors and a ton of other useful information. Submitting a sitemap to Google with frequent posting can help you get your posts and pages indexed faster. In fact, if you just created a new piece of content, you can manually crawl it in the tool to get it indexed right away.
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.
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Url Blacklist: How To Check If Your Site Is Banned In Google And Fix It
Did your search engine traffic suddenly drop or perhaps youre about to purchase a domain name? Its always wise to check if the domain name or URL has been blacklisted or de-indexed by Google.
However, its important to remember, there are several other reasons your website traffic could be dropping rapidly. But it never hurts to check if your pages are still being indexed by Google.
How To Avoid Getting Blacklisted
Its much easier to stay off of blacklists than to get your address removed once its been flagged. Aside from making sure that you dont fall into spam traps, here are a few other ways to prevent your IP from being blacklisted:
- Maintain an opt-in list. Never email someone without their permission. An opt-in list may take more time to grow, but its much higher quality and much less likely to get flagged.
- Remove addresses that bounce. If you get a notice that an email has bounced and/or otherwise been noted as undeliverable, remove it from your list. The more you message these types of addresses, the more likely it becomes that youll get blacklisted.
- Check your contact list for typos. Set aside some time to scroll through your contact list and make sure that everything is input correctly. It could take a while, but its worth it for assurance that youre not sending out dud messages.
- Perform routine maintenance. Prune your email list regularly to ensure no spam accounts, bounced emails, or incorrect emails have made it on there.
Want to take the guesswork out of staying off of blacklists? Use an email automation tool, like Benchmark Email. Our software integrates with various deliverability tools, which can help you ensure your lists stay clean, your emails make it to the inbox, and overall, youre doing all you can to avoid getting blacklisted.
Email marketing,
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What To Do If The Ip Address Or Domain Name Is On An Email Blacklist
There are three things you must have to do immediately when you discover youre on an email blacklist:
1. Try to find out the actual reasons behind being banned. Consider the following issues:
- Have you bought the list of emails from external sources just to target more people? Such lists are often spam traps and can lead you to the blacklist. Want to learn more about spamtraps? Read on here
- Your email campaign looks like a forced promotional message not providing any value to the user
- Have you been using the same list of email without removing the inactive or bounced email addresses? This clearly highlights that you dont care about the people who are receiving your emails
- Check if your email list has grown dramatically over a week. A sudden increase in the volume usually indicates the purchase of email lists from paid sources, which raises alarm at the MSPs level
- Ensure that you are taking in account the unsubscribers under consideration. Remove them from your email list immediately and do not target them again against their willingness as they are most likely going to mark your email as spam
2. The second effort you need to make is to request that your name be removed from the blacklist while you find the actual cause of getting into one in the first place. Depending upon the listing, you might have to fill a form or send an email to be out of the listing. Finding the right method might require a bit of research.
Keep Your Contact List Up To Date
Keep in mind that engagement has an impact on deliverability. If a contact hasnt opened an email from you in six months, then its time to delete. Unengaged contacts are more likely to mark you as spam if you keep hounding them with emails .
Remove them along with any unsubscribes and inactive addresses as part of regular list cleaning.
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How Isp Use Their Internal Email Blacklist
Every email service provider including Gmail, Y-mail, and Outlook has a domain reputation list that would mark you as a good or bad sender based on your email activity and would use your domain reputation to decide your email eligibility to be delivered to the inbox. Take an instance of Gmail, they provide a tool called in which you can check your domain reputation. Based on the domain reputation action on the received email is decided by the Gmail ISP.
We all know that there are many ISPs other than google and they too have their reputation list and blacklist, but right now you will only get notifications regarding emails being dropped as warnings. These services haven’t kept their reputation list to be checked and accessed by the public right now, but you can expect it in the near future.
You can see those warnings if you send your emails to yourself and check the email.
Getting listed in the ISP’s own blacklist sometimes can a lot problematic than being listed in the third partly RBLs, mainly due to strict policies they use to filter spams and they don’t go easy on emails who don’t comply with their email policies. Mailbox services such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook are one of the largest MSPs and provides inboxing to most of the number of people in the world, so you want to be on the good side of these services.
Gmail Spam FilterYahoo Spam Filter
What can we conclude from the above discussion?
How To Get Unspam Email Services
Unspam is available to test for free at their website, unspam.email. There you can send an example email to see how effective your emails are. After sending this sample email, you can see if your domain is blacklisted and get a heat test to see how effective your emails are.
If youre impressed by this test, you can sign up for the other services provided by unspam. Signing up is easy and only requires some information on your end. By signing up you can use all the services provided long-term and make your emails more effective for all subscribers.
For more information or try the testing service, you can visit the website unspam.email. Here you can test some of the services and see all the services offered. There is also a place to send further questions and concerns about the services Unspam provides.
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How To Check Whether Your Ip Address Is Blocklisted
Steve Freegard,
Sr. Product Owner Abusix Intelligence
Email can be the lifeline of a business a way to communicate with your customers and advertise your products straight to their inboxes.
But what if that lifeline is suddenly cut off?
This is called IP blocklisting . Its a method used by networks to block IP addresses they think are malicious or sending out spam.
Its costly for businesses, too. Studies show spam costs businesses more than $20 billion annually and harms productivity.
For all of these reasons, avoiding an IP blocklist should be at the top of your priority list.
Not only does staying off blocklists help your email deliverability, but it can also boost your teams productivity and save your company money.
This article is going to cover:
- What is an IP blocklist, and what does it mean for your business?
- Warning signs that youve been blocklisted.
- How to check if your IP address or domain has been blocklisted
- How to avoid your IP address or domain being blocklisted
- How to remove your IP address or domain from a blocklist
Why Is It Bad To Be On Domain Blacklist
Getting your domain blacklisted has detrimental consequences for every business in every niche regardless of scale and overall brand reputation. The harmful outcomes of getting into domain blacklist are
- Ruin of credibility, trustworthiness, and goodwill.
- Tarnishment of brand reputation.
- Get banned from operating in specific geographic locations.
- Become inaccessible to visitors because hosted site is blocked.
- Financial strain.
- A plunge of profit.
So, in a word, even a month of staying on the domain blacklist may ruin everything, starting with a decrease in customer engagement and conversion rates and ending with losing all your profit.
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