Email Blacklisting
What is it?
Spammers can either send unsolicited bulk emails from a temporary email account or they can hack into another computer and send it from there. Anti-spam services like SpamCop receive reports of spam and create an “email blacklist” of reported spammers by IP address. People who run email services and systems, configure them to reject emails that come from a “blacklisted” computer.
Now there are well over 100 email blacklists. There are two basic types, those that blacklist a single IP address and those that blacklist a large block of IP addresses.
The blacklist of a single computer is much easier to be removed from. You will be asked to show that you have repaired the security breach that allowed the spamming or show that the offending account was removed from that server.
The “Guilt by Association” type of blacklist that lists a large block of IP addresses is a much tougher one to fix. The companies that prepare the blacklists know that it is easy for an unethical spammer to rotate through a block of IP addresses, so they blacklist a large block… up to 1000 IP addresses. Now this catches many thousands of innocent email senders that get their emails rejected because of someone they don’t know or even have any relationship with.
How to Avoid?
The best way is to only purchase hosting services through someone who has a zero tolerance policy toward spam. We learned our lesson. Like many Internet marketing and web design firms, we supply hosting. Ours is a very high quality business class hosting with all the support, bells and whistles.
Even though our hosting has a zero tolerance Spam policy, we housed our computer in a data center that had a lenient Spam enforcement policy. We spent an enormous amount of time fighting these “Guilt by Association” blacklists.
About one year ago we moved to a new data center that had a very strict zero tolerance Spam policy. In the last year, we have not had a single blacklisting incident. Although this data center cost us twice as much, we have saved a tremendous amount in technical support costs. Lesson learned: Cheaper hosting is not suitable for hosting business websites.