As careful as your email marketing efforts may be, a danger might knocking at your door: the possibility of being blacklisted.
Whether you’ve just been blacklisted or want to avoid a preventable fate, it’s important to understand what email blacklists are and how to deal with them effectively.
First, there are three main types of email blacklists:
- User created blacklists – Individual users can use filters, spam blockers, and email client features to add senders to their blacklists. When these tools are used, any time a blacklisted sender sends an email to that person, the email is automatically blocked and deleted. There’s little you can do about individual preferences.
- Service provider blacklists – These blacklists originate at the ISP level. For example, if an ISP such as AOL or Gmail blacklists a spammer, all messages from that spammer to the ISP’s customers will be blocked.
- Spam reporting services – The proliferation of spam has spawned an entire industry of spam reporting and blocking services such as SpamCop, SpamHaus, and Spam Open Relay and Blocking System (SORBS). Users can report spam to services like these which then publish lists of compromised hosts. It’s important to note that email spam blocking tools and ISPs alike have access to these massive lists and may incorporate them into their own spam blocking solutions.
How do you know if you’ve been blacklisted? You may notice some clues at first such as a reduced number of expected click-throughs and conversions. Rather than scratching your head and wondering what’s going on with your email campaign, it’s not a bad idea to check to see if you’ve been blacklisted. Just as spam reporting services have proliferated, the same is true of blacklist checkers. A few blacklist checking tools that might help your investigation include: BlacklistCheck.com, BlacklistedIP.com, and EmailReach.com.
Social media expert 
