by Lina Martinez

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Email marketing is one of the essential things that will make your business successful, but a barrier to this, is the possibility that some of your emails won’t get through to your audience due to going into the spam folder.

There are over a hundred SPAM blacklists in operation but luckily there are a few tools and strategies available to help you stay off them, and if you are on them, to remedy the situation.

The majority of SPAM blacklists track the reputation of the email servers that you are using to send outgoing email from your particular domain (i.e. your web address).  

There are essentially three different types of blacklists:

Public Blacklists.  These are blacklists that can be directly checked as they are publicly available; this is good news for you, as the ease at which you can check them makes your life a lot easier.  There are several blacklist checking tools that can quickly scan the top one hundred public blacklists.

Of the 125 or so public blacklists a handful are serious in the sense they can cause a dramatic decline in how many emails aren’t delivered.  To check whether you are on these blacklists you just need to know your servers IP address and visit a vite such as this one.

Potentially the most widely used public blacklist is SPAMHaus who is on a mission to rid the world of unsolicited email by monitoring a network of millions  of email addresses.

Enterprise SPAM Firewalls.  These are essentially firewalls managed by corporate IT departments. For instance, McAffee would be in this category.

Private / ISP Blacklists. Most major ISPs (e.g. Gmail and Yahoo) maintain their own internal blacklists within their spam filtering process.

Now that we’ve covered the three main types of spam list the most important thing is to look at how to avoid getting put on there; for instance you could use email scrubbing and email verification to reduce bounce rate.

1. Avoid Purchased Lists

If you’ve ever felt tempted to grow your email list by a few hundred thousand in one go, then you’ll have likely bene triggered by an advert suggesting you can buy vast amounts of ‘targeted leads’ for just a few dollars.  These are known as purchased lists.

Purchased lists are ultimately ticking time bombs as they will devastate your reputation as a trustworthy sender of email, as these lists will be riddled with dead emails meaning they will quickly inform mailbox providers that you are sending unsolicited emails - which is one of the fastest ways you can get onto the blacklists above.

2. Use A Reliable ESP

Email Service Providers (ESP) are evaluated by blacklists based on the reputation of the sender's IP address and the domains of their clients.

ESPs that send only solicited emails and have a tendency to ban spammers, meaning they run a pretty tight ship, have greater credibility with mailbox providers such as Gmail and Hotmail; whereas if you’re with a more careless ESP then it’s possible your emails will go straight to the spam folder of your list.

3. Consider Your “From” Field

Mailbox providers evaluate more than just the email sender’s IP address, domain and content within the message. Yahoo! Mail, in particular, seems to pays close attention to the From field address in an attempt to assess the legitimacy and reliability of the person sending the message.

On this topic you want to avoid obscure names such as 18477363@domain.com or noreply@domain.com as these are likely to be blocked, whereas by using clear and trustworthy names such as support@domain.com or contact@domain.com then you seem like a more credible sender, so your messages get through.