What is a blacklist?

It is a question I actually had to answer to one of my clients this weekend in regards to their personal email address. What is a Blacklisted email address? A blacklist is a list of servers or domains that a blacklist operator has deemed it sends spam emails although not all blacklists are created equally. Smaller blacklists such as Spam Cannibal and NoSolicitado usually have less of an impact overall but some – such as SpamHaus and Barracuda – are well known and can be very powerful. The impact that a blacklisting has on “deliverability” depends on a number of things but mainly the recipient server subscribing to the blacklist.

How does a blacklisting happen?

If for example one of our customers sends an email campaign to a data-list he has bought or has scraped, or third party contacts (or even is simply very old) on that is outdated or contains purchased, scraped, or third party contacts, there is a high chance our servers could be temporarily blacklisted. Blacklistings are caused by emailing spam traps.

Your next question would off course be..what is a Spam trap? Spam traps are a type of fraud management tool, used by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to identify spammers so they can block emails from them. A spam trap looks like a real email address, but it doesn’t belong to a real person and can’t be used for any kind of communication. Fort example, if email address hasn’t engaged with an email for over one year, it then has the potential to be a spam trap. Spam traps are also often placed on publicly available web pages and in the lists of data providers to report on senders who are scraping and emailing contacts without opt-in.

What preventative steps can you take?

There are a few steps you can take to avoid blacklisting but you mainly need to ensure that your marketing strategy is following the general accepted practices for email deliverability.  Regularly maintaining your contact database and removing contacts who have not engaged with your mail in the past year is an easy first step to take. If your sending list is outdated, you can run a permission pass campaign.

Has the above helped you get a better understanding of Blacklisting? Do you have any questions? Do you believe there is something we should add to this blog?

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