Recipient Blacklisting or Rejection
Blacklisting is a process used to improve email security. Many email servers utilize one or more blacklists to improve their ability to filter out messages from senders, who have history of sending out spam or engaging in phishing attempts. By implementing blacklisting, these email servers can significantly reduce possiblity of mail delivery errors and improve overall email communication.
This article discusses email delivery issues caused by blacklist rejections and covers the following key topics related to blacklisting.
- Impacts of Being on an Email Blacklist ⤵
- How to Check for Blacklisting ⤵
- How to Handle Blacklisting ⤵
- How to Remove Yourself from an Email Blacklist ⤵
- Blacklists HostGator Will Not Address ⤵
- Receiving Mail From Blacklisted Sources ⤵
Impacts of Being on an Email Blacklist
Being blacklisted can impact your email communication. Here are some negative effect that could arise from being on an email blacklist.
- Email Delivery Issues
Email sent from blacklisted addresses are likely to be blocked and routed to the Spam folder, which reduces the chances of your recipients to see them.
- Declining Delivery Rates
Email delivery rates plummet, which means a large portion of your emails would not make it to the Inbox, This will then result to reduced engagement as the emails do not reach their intended recipients, leading to diminished opportunities for interaction.
- Reputation Damage
Being on a blacklist can harm your sender reputation, making it more likely for email service providers to mark your future emails as spam.
- Increased Bounce Rates
You will likely see an increase in email bounces as servers reject your emails due to the blacklisted status of your server IP.
- Loss of Business Opportunities
Poor email deliverability can lead to missed opportunities and interrupting important communications with clients, customers, or prospects.
- Time-Consuming Removal Process
Getting removed from a blacklist requires identifying the cause of blacklisting, resolving these issues, and then contacting the blacklist operator to request removal.
How to Check for Blacklisting
Checking for blacklisting can be difficult and looking for it can prevent troubleshooting more relevant issues. If you are not receiving a delivery error which explicitly states you are being blacklisted, you likely have another issue that is faster and easier to resolve.
Popular webtools, such as mxtoolbox.com, should not be used to troubleshoot blacklisting. These tools frequently include a blacklist report that commonly include some or all of the following errors:
- Stale results: A false positive from a blacklist that has already been delisted.
- Irrelevant results: Blacklists that will not prevent your mail from being successfully delivered.
- Inaccurate results: Frequently, these tools use your domain's IP address, which is where your website is hosted at and not the IP used to send your email.
- Incomplete results: These tools will not identify spam blocks from major email providers, such as Google or Yahoo, or ISPs such as AT&T.
Given these issues with the core functionality of the blacklist checks these tools performs, HostGator strongly recommends disregarding these results unless you are receiving mail delivery errors that specify blacklisting.
If you are receiving mail delivery errors that specify blacklisting, please proceed to the How to Handle Blacklisting section below. Otherwise, please check the following articles for any errors you are experiencing:
How to Handle Blacklisting
Many different aspects of your email may be blacklisted, including but not limited to the source IP address, your domain name, your email content, or the server IP address. HostGator can assist you directly with blacklisting issues only if you receive error messages indicating that your server is blacklisted.
Sample error message may look something like this:
"Connected to 198.12.34.56, but the sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 550 70.89.12.345 is blacklisted at ix.dnsbl.manitu.net"
This means that the IP address 70.89.12.345 is blacklisted by ix.dnsbl.manitu.net, and the email was rejected on that basis.
To help you understand error messages related to your server's IP address being blacklisted, please refer to the article, Return Messages.
If you receive error messages suggesting that your server is blacklisted, you must provide the full headers from those error messages to our Support team so we can assist you effectively. The following article will help you view the full headers of your email.
After retrieving the full headers from your error message, please contact us for assistance.
How to Remove Yourself from an Email Blacklist
If you discover that your email address, domain, local IP address, or content is specifically blocked, you typically need to reach out to the organization that has blacklisted you and follow their blacklist removal process. Please note that each blocking agency may have a different procedure.
Here are some links that provide procedures for removing your email address from blacklist of common email providers.
Blacklists HostGator Will Not Address
There are some blacklists that do not prevent email from being delivered. In order to effectively stop mail, a blacklist must be subscribed to by an email server.
We maintain a list of blacklists which do not prevent mail delivery, and from which no mail delivery errors should result. However, almost all of these blacklists can and frequently are reported by third-party blacklist checking tools.
HostGator will not address any blacklisting issue without a delivery error message (including the full headers) specifically referencing them as the source of rejection.
Receiving Mail From Blacklisted Sources
Our Shared servers keep a list in sync with companies that monitor IP addresses that are sending spam. If a sender's IP address is on this list, then our servers will block email from the IP until the sender's IP is no longer on the list. Our list is updated every four hours which will allow for mail to continue normal delivery if the sender has their IP address removed from the blacklist.
If the sender can have the IP address removed from the blacklist, you will be able to receive email from them normally.