Help! I’m on a Blacklist and I Can’t Get Off!

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We’ve often covered the many tips and strategies to avoid being placed on blacklists, but what happens when you have unfortunately landed on one? It can be detrimental to your overall business and needs to be remedied quickly.

There is no universal set of instructions for removal, because not all blacklists are the same. But here are steps a company can take if they find themselves trapped in email’s worst nightmare. 

1.      First and foremost, confirm you are on a blacklist.

Some email services don’t notify you when you’ve been added to one, so you will have to find out on your own.

Look at the message attached to the rejected email and see if it indicates what specific organization or company chose to blacklist you, and follow their specific instructions on how to be removed.

If there is no indication of who did it, visit one of the following websites listed in this blog post. Enter your IP address and you should be able to follow specific directions from there.

2.      Ask yourself if you’re using a shared server provided by the same web hosting service.

If it turns out you do share a server, your provider will need to handle the issue for you. In this case, it might end up that you need an entirely new IP address, since blacklists block IP addresses and not domain names. Make sure your new IP address is significantly different!

3.      Remove it yourself

Sometimes, you will have to pay a fine to get off of one or rely on a host to approve the removal. Other times, you can resolve the problem yourself by filling out a form that will get you “white-listed”. 

However be warned – if you are re-listed a certain amount of times and still commit email violations, you can face being blacklisted for a certain amount of years, or in some cases forever. This involves knowing what you did wrong in the first place to violate email regulations.

4.      Use a deliverability expert

Companies waste valuable time trying to figure out what went wrong, why they were blacklisted, and who blacklisted them. Email deliverability experts with strong ties to ISPs can save you time and get your email back in action much quicker than the average joe.

Always remember that it’s not the blacklist itself that is inhibiting your emails, but rather the recipient who has reported you to a third party. Stay off blacklists in the future by being an email people want to see, and clear up any miscommunications with those who made the decision to report you.

Any other tips for getting off a blacklist? Leave a comment in the section below. 

Jonathon Mahon is a content marketer, writer and designer based in Boston. He writes for various digital publications and blogs specializing in the cloud, email automation, software, and technology.