Are You On ...a Blacklist?

If you run your email with your web-hosting as many business do, you may have already suffered the inconvenience of one day finding that your emails sent to certain recipients get bounced back at you with a very robotic-looking message that seems to vaguely refer to a poor reputation.

This can be particularly upsetting for ladies. ;D

What you are seeing is indeed a rejection of your message by the reputation service enlisted by the Internet Service Provider of your intended recipient. Worse is, it's not the message being blocked, it's the IP address of your server. So all email accounts that run from your hosting are affected.

"But why me?!! I'm not a #&^*@! spammer... All I do is GET spam!"

Exactly.

It could be that an email account on your hosting has been compromised by a malicious script from within an email, or an external hack.
Or it could be an innocent mistake by a user at your end. Unfortunately with the ridiculous prevalence of spam nowadays, the largely futile measures taken by ISP's to try and protect their customers tend to also take out their customers as collateral damage.  A Blacklisting could be triggered by things such as:

• Sending too many emails in succession
• Sending to large mailing lists
• Forwarding an email from an undetermined source
• Clicking a link or download in an email from an undetermined source
• Sending emails to an address that does not exist or is expired

What can you do if your Domain/Server IP is blacklisted.
Because of the overwhelming prevalence of spam and the mass incidence of false-positive listings, most Blacklists will de-list automatically between 1 and 7 days.  Some Blacklists may require a removal request to be sent.

To see which Blacklist is blocking you from your intended recipient, either

• refer to the failure notification message that you received, or
• perform a search using an online service like www.mxtoolbox.com

The important thing is that you find out whether or not your email account/s remain comprised.  Repeated listings would indicate that there is an issue.  In such a case, the simplest and surest thing may be to delete the offending email account from both the server and every office computer, and then re-create it afresh. Yes, you WILL LOSE YOUR MESSAGES when you do this, so take steps to record anything that must not be lost.

What can you do to minimise the chance of being Blacklisted?

• Be careful using mailing lists
• Use a quality internet security software application with email scanning
• Do not forward emails that have "done the rounds". You know the ones.
• Clear junk folders every time you check you mail.
• Use complex passwords and change them periodically.

Another option to consider may be to run your email through a external paid subscription service like Google My Business (previously Google Apps for Business).  This option is highly recommended for people travelling internationally with on business, when reliable sending of email becomes even more difficult to achieve.

For those with patience and a reasonable level of web-savvy, avoiding the blacklist is something that be achieved reasonably easily.

But if the back-end of the internet is really the last place you'd want to be, Lime Dezign can work through the issues with you.

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