Is My Domain On A Spam List

Checking Email Header Of Undeliverable Error Messages

When you send an email and it is being block, you will receive an undeliverable error message. Check the email header of the message and look for clues and codes that look something like the following:

550 Service unavailable client host blocked using Blocklist, mail from IP banned by xx.xx.com

553 your IP is on our block list.

How To Check Your Site

The Google blacklist is easiest to check. Type your URL in any browser. If your site is blocked, you know its blacklisted.

But this is only one blacklist. There are many others that can cause issues for your domain.

Uptime.com accounts include a domain blacklist check that scans over 100 of the most popular blacklists per day to ensure your domain isnt included. If the check is down, youll receive an alert with details.

How Did I Get On An Email Blacklist

There are any ways you can end up on an email blacklist.

1. You are sending out monthly email newsletters to a large number of recipients from an unmanaged mailing list. By unmanaged, we mean you are not honoring the unsubscribe requests from users who want to opt out of your newsletter.

2. You have an easy-to-guess email password and your account has been hacked by spammers.

3. Someone is spoofing your email address. Are you are getting bounce messages for emails you didnt send? Someone could be using your email address as the from address when mass mailing spam.

Just remember, all it takes is just a handful of report as spam clicks and your email address will end up on a blacklist.

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Is My Email Blacklisted

There are over a hundred of spam blacklists. Most blacklists track the reputation of the sending mail server and the sending domain name.

In this article, we will show you how to check if your email address is on a spam blacklist and we will also go over what you can do if your email address has been blacklisted.

How Do Sites Get Blacklisted

Each blacklist has its own criteria for including a domain, but the three main types of criteria are:

Technical reasons include server misconfiguration, DNS record errors, and incorrect or missing banners, and other issues. Many of these issues point to the existence of malware on a server, which may be there without the knowledge of the domain owner. Any malware or viruses found on a domain fall in this category.

Policy criteria is when an operator doesnt want to receive email from certain countries or ISPs, usually because they do not honor unsubscribe requests.

Evidence-based reasons are when an operator has direct or indirect evidence a domain is involved in sending spam email.

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Lower Than Average Email Open Rates

The first sign of a deliverability problem is usually low/declining open rates – often with click rates that remain steady.

Open rate is an imperfect metric, but it’s fair to say that if your open rate is significantly below the average for your industry, you likely have an email deliverability problem. While its true, poor quality content, seasonality and many other factors can influence open rates for business email, a longer term downward trend usually indicates a problem.

Open rates vary by industry. Take a look at the chart below that shows average email open rates by industry to see how you stack up.

The average email open rate across all industries is 22.86%. A 2%, 4% or even 10% open rate is below average in any industry. If your open rate is this low, you likely have a deliverability issue.

So how can you make sure your domain reputation stay health and emails don’t land in spam?

How Blacklists Monitor Reputation

Several SPAM blacklists monitor the sending reputation of more than just the email server IP address. They also track senders reputation by sending domain, and /or by DKIM identity, and virtually all blacklists now share reputation information among themselves in near real-time.

If youd like to learn the inner details about how a SPAM firewall works including what spam filters actually check in order to determine yoru senders reputation , check our webinar How a SPAM Firewall Works.

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How To Check If Your Email Domain Is Blacklisted

Do you know that number of spam emails greatly exceeds the number of legitimate emails? According to recent studies, more than 80% of all emails are spam, which costs businesses a staggering $20 billion every year.

Spam is a serious and costly thing. It is no wonder why large companies, ISPs, and mail service providers are obsessed with preventing it from escalating. They tighten the rules to regulate spam activity, make filters aggressive and ruthless, and of course, regularly update domain blacklists.

All these measures improve the global situation however, they do come at a certain price for regular businesses.

The deal is, today, even at the slightest suspicion of malware behavior or sending out spam, you risk getting into a domain blacklist that brings about damaging consequences for business and email marketing in particular. To make matters worse, no one will notify you about that. The only way to find out this is to check blacklist domain and see whether you are in or not.

Therefore, let us find out how to check blacklist domain so that nothing interrupts you from achieving your financial goals.

• Phishing Blacklists,
• Spam Blacklists.

Today we are going to focus on domain blacklists, also known as URI Real-time Blacklists. They comprise spam domain names that appear within the email body. There are a hundred of them in the wild that can be broken into three main categories.

What Blacklisting An Ip Address Means

The tool checks whether the given URL, IP address, or email server’s IP is listed with DNSBL. Email system providers utilize that database to filter out spam emails before they finally reach the end-users.

For example, if your company uses email marketing and you send out thousands of emails to promote your new product, some of the receivers mark that email as spam. There is a high chance that your IP will be on the IP blacklist, which needs to be avoided.

IP address blacklisting is the process or method to filter out or block the illegitimate or malicious IP addresses to access your network. It occurs when a web hosting company ultimately ignores your IP address. More precisely, any email you try to send is consequently blocked and filtered as spam.

One estimate concludes that email traffic consists of 80% of spam emails. That overwhelming amount of commercial emails lead to strict blacklisting practices to keep the inboxes spam-free.

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Why Do Domains Get Blacklisted

There are several reasons which can cause blacklisting.

Some of them are:

• Your emails have been reported as spam.
• An ISP is blacklisted.
• Your server lacks proper configuration or has malware.
• Your IP has been detected in a Business Email Compromise attack due to criminal behavior.

These are some of the most common reasons which can land you on a DNS-based blacklist. Delisting depends on the specific list and the reason that got you there.

How To Check If Domain Is Blacklisted

A blacklist is a list of websites or IP addresses that are reported as sources of spam, viruses, fraud, and other malicious activity. If your website appears on a blacklist database, youll likely see drops in traffic from users with email clients and antivirus programs that use these databases. The easiest way to avoid being on a blacklist is to not send spam emails and be cautious about what you link to. This article will guide you on using a Blacklist Checker and its SEO importance.

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Get Your Name Off A Blacklist

If you end up on a blacklist, it wont be easy to reliably send messages until you get it resolved. This is especially true for new addresses on your contact lists.

What you can do is first check if you have been blacklisted from services like the following:

• Domain Blacklist Check

NOTE

If you have the unfortunate experience of being on a blacklist, youll have to first follow up on the website that added you to their blacklist. This will be the first step to getting this situation resolved.

In the end, theres really not much else that anyone can do about it. We cant control how messages are received or force people to control how they receive them. But you can make sure that you follow best practices to try and avoid being perceived as junk.

What Happens When Youre On An Email Blacklist

Imagine that you have no clue your IP address was flagged as a blacklist email.

So you go about your regular email marketing activities and launch a campaign. Well say its a sales promotion and John is on the contact list. The email goes to his internet service provider , which checks your IP address against whatever email blacklists his ISP uses.

Bingo, theres a match. Your email is discarded. John either never gets news of your sales promotion or, if he does, its delivered to the spam folder that he rarely checks.

This blockage clearly has a harmful effect on email deliverability. Being identified as a blacklisted email sender can wreak havoc on your email marketing efforts.

But reallyhow worried should you be? According to Omnisend Deliverability Manager Serhii Chernenko, it depends on what blacklist youre on.

Some are more influential, respected and impactful, like Spamhaus, Cloudmark and Barracuda. You should be pretty worried if those have you listed, as impact would be significant, Chernenko says. Some RBLs will have way less impact on your deliverability or even zero impact, so it is important to monitor the biggest RBLs.

And its absolutely essential that you regularly keep an eye on your email campaign stats, such as click rates. Though the iOS 15 update might skew the metrics, theres a chance that the open rate could be an indication of something gone awry.

Persistently check domain opens for any sharp drop-offs as well.

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How Senders Get Blacklisted

To be more precise, we should have named the article How do legitimate senders turn into blacklisted email senders?

Spammers get caught red-handed and punished very quickly because modern spam filters are very good at their job and because spam senders cant be bothered with keeping a low profile. They know they will be caught and banned, so they try to cause as much harm as possible before their gig is over.

How do well-meaning senders get caught up in the mix?

Unlike Santa, blacklists dont know if youre a good person. They only work with the data that was submitted to them via several sources.

• Your recipients. All advanced anti-spam techniques rely on the vigilance and dutifulness of users. Whenever you click the Send to spam button, you do more than just getting rid of an annoying email. You inform your internet service provider and your email service provider about a potential danger so that they can process this information and use it to weaponize themselves against new spam techniques. That also means that if you pester and annoy your recipients, they will get you blacklisted.
• Spam traps. Spam traps are email addresses meant to catch users who buy large email databases, dont verify them and start sending large volumes of messages. If such an address keeps receiving tons of emails, it labels the sender as a spammer and their domain is added to the blacklist. There are several types of spam traps you should know about.

Make It A Clean Slate

Unfortunately, nearly every company will be placed on one or more email blacklist at some point. Its just an inevitable part of running a business that values the potential of email-based marketing.

Email blacklists are not permanent, though, and there are several actions you can take to prevent it from happening. It will also boost the odds that avoid spam complaints and that your messages will arrive in a recipients inbox.

If youre reading this because youve run into issues with your own ESP and youre ready for a clean slate, start Omnisend for free. And make sure to warm up your sender reputationit will set you on the path toward a blacklist-free existence.

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Checking Your Email Address Against Public Blacklists

Because public blacklists are publicly available, it should be the starting point in checking if your email address has been blacklisted.

There are over 120 notable public blacklists, and being listed on just a few of them is enough to cause you email delivery problems. Fortunately, there are free tools and websites that you can use.

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How To Create A Whitelist Or Blacklist Entry

The Whitelist allows you to choose who you always want to receive email from. The Blacklist will enable you to choose whom you want to never receive email from. To create a single Whitelist or Blacklist entry:

You can delete an unwanted entry at any time by clicking Delete under the Options column.

For further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us if spam persists.

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How To Avoid Being Blacklisted

To avoid the necessity to check if your domain is marked as spam, start to build a good sender reputation from the very start and your emails will be less likely to fail delivery to Inbox.

• Use Double Opt-In. This way you can protect your base from bots, spam traps and invalid addresses. If you started collecting contacts before implementing DOI, ask these people to confirm their addresses.
• Verify your domain.
• Watch after your contact base hygiene. Dont hesitate to delete contacts who havent opened your emails for a long time. Some boxes could have turned into spam traps or ceased to exist. Therefore, it is necessary to clean the base regularly.
• Add a captcha to the subscription form. It will protect you from bots.
• Register with postmasters and monitor your sender reputation.
• Regularly check spam databases.
• Pay attention to the error rate in your reports. In our platform, for example, you can see why your delivery failed. If the reason is Message blocked due to spam content in the message, you need to revise your content strategy.

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How An Ip Blacklist Integrates With An Email Service

The process is simple.

The 101 On Email Blacklists

Your email campaign open rate hovers around 18%. Then suddenly one day, it plummets to 5%.

Maybe it was just a blip, you think. Until it happens with the next emailand the next. Now youre in full panic mode. Suspicions of that feared email marketing dead landthe email blacklisthave reached a crescendo.

But how do you truly know if thats the cause? And why would you have been banished to the email blacklist?

We answer both questions, as well as how to break free from an email blacklist and steps to avoid one in the first place.

But first, its critical to grasp what a blacklist is and how it affects your email marketing efforts.

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