My Emails Are Not Being Delivered. Black Lists and White Lists Explained.by Karen Fegarty
Over 40% of all emails within your marketing campaign are not being delivered. You may not even be aware of this, as many ISPs will not send back a bounce message. In fact if you are sending messages to AOL customers, AOL is now blocking over 80% of
messages that come into their servers.
One of main reasons that this is occurring is that your IP or Domain may be Black Listed. All major ISP's and many corporate email systems now check against Black Lists and will refuse to deliver any emails that come from an IP that is Black Listed.
But what exactly is a Black List?
DNS black lists are lists of domains and IP's that are known to originate Spam. Many anti-spam software programs used by corporations and ISP's use these lists to control Spam by refusing any email that originates from one of these domains or IPs.
Unfortunately there are many instances of false positives as there are few checks and often little objectivity when listing a particular IP. In order for a black list to know that a domain is sending Spam, offence must be reported . It may take only one report via a web form for you to be listed.
You may be listed maliciously through one complaint of a client, or that of a competitor. Many Black Lists, as well, will list not only IP that is suspected as spamming, but willlist any IPs in that range of addresses. If someone using same Internet provider as you is accused of spamming and is placed on a Black List, you may be listed as well.
DNS blacklists are usually maintained by anti-spam organizations or by individuals.
What are some of most popular Black Lists that ISPs are using?
Some of these include:
MAPS - http://www.mail-abuse.com/ Spam Cop - http://www.spamcop.net/ SpamHaus - http://www.spamhaus.org/ SPEWS.org - http://www.spews.org/ ORDB.org - Open Relay Database - http://www.ordb.org/
How do I know if I am on a Black List?
