Avoid email blacklisting – Outsource

Email is essential to your business. But how your email server is managed has an invisible and intrinsic effect on whether your email reaches your recipients, especially if you have a tendency to send emails to large numbers of recipients (read why this is bad here)

Many businesses use virtual hosting – a topic I have discussed elsewhere – and while virtual hosting means low cost, it also means your mail server is shared with many, many, many other websites. Although your email address is kept separate, the IP address – the key identifier on the Internet – is shared with sometimes tens of thousands of other website domains. If any one of those domains starts sending out unsolicited email (spam), the recipients of that email can flag the message as spam. The more people flag the message, and the more regularly the spam is flagged, the more likely the IP address will find its way on to a blacklist. And once it is there, it will gradually propagate to many of the numerous recognised blacklists on the web.

The problem here is that ISPs use these blacklists to filter out unwanted spam on a broad spectrum. Some enable them by default, which means your email (which tracks back to the same blacklisted IP address) may automatically end up in your recipients spam folder by default, or worse not be allowed through at all. Organisations like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail as well as most of the reputable ISPs use these blacklists in some way or other which means the chances of reliable email delivery from your account are reduced.

The reason why you want to avoid getting on these blacklists (aside from emails not getting through) is the cost of removal. This requires CxO input – usually from the CEO or company owner directly – to liaise and deal with each and every blacklist the IP address has been listed on and ask to be removed. This process is not a quick call as it requires evidence to support why it should be removed and proof of who you are. It was estimated (by Rackspace in a recent support call) that this process would – on average – take about 3-4 hours per day for 2 weeks to resolve. In other words – expensive! It’s either that or change your mail server, which is not possible with virtual hosting providers as the service is all wrapped in the budget package.

The better alternative to losing this time is to outsource your email services to a third-party specialist provider who exclusively concentrate on email. We do this at Emissary, and while there are a few restrictions on how the email accounts can be used, these are all within normal daily use parameters for 99% of businesses. The AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) of the email provider covers these points and includes things like not sending one email to lots of recipients (either as CC or BCC, or by repeatedly sending the email to multiple consecutive recipients). The AUP is heavily focused on stopping abuse of the email server and therefore preventing the possibility of your email account being blacklisted. Prevention is better than cure.

But what about mailing lists?

Again, outsource this to a reputable provider (as we do). Don’t try to use your main email account server (especially if it’s already outsourced) to provide the gateway through which you send emails. This will eventually lead to some of your recipients reporting you for spamming them (even if your intentions were good) and you’ll end up on the blacklists. This is especially true if you use the company that provides you with your Internet connection – their mail servers process thousands of email accounts and are often open to abuse so you’ll be guilty by association.

Some clients run their own in-house mailing list systems, and while these are OK for small runs, as soon as you hit relatively low limits (e.g. 250 recipients) you are entering spam territory. If your mailing list is built via opt-in subscriptions through a web form, then this list will be safe from people reporting you for spam (as long as you have an unsubscribe link). But if you have added everybody you’ve met at a networking event in the last 2 years to boost your numbers, chances are 80% of them won’t remember you and you’ll get a lot of them reporting you as a spammer.

Are there other benefits?

Aside from not being blacklisted (which is major) there may also be other benefits such as archiving, backup, usage tracking and additional services that tie in with corporate governance such as legal discovery (US). These are all things that you can guarantee aren’t available from a standard email account that comes bundled with a standard hosting plan.

Want to know more?

Post a comment below and ask a question about this article and I’ll get back to you.
No spam please

2 Responses to “Avoid email blacklisting – Outsource”

1. UK Embedded » Blog Archive » 95% of email traffic is Spam says:

   January 26, 2010 at 05:00

   [...] Avoid email blacklisting – Outsource (brilliantthinking.net) [...]
2. Darwin Grant says:

   February 6, 2010 at 14:27

   Pretty good article, really enlightening stuff. Never imagined I would find the facts I want right here. I’ve been looking all over the internet for some time now and had been starting to get frustrated. Luckily, I stumbled across your website and received exactly what I was struggling to find.