How do I know if I’m on a SPAM Blacklist?
Email Blacklists – Is Your Email Blocked?
We often get the question: "How do I know if my company is on a SPAM Blacklist?" Followed by "If my company is on a SPAM blacklist, how the heck do we get unlisted?
There are over a hundred SPAM blacklists – private corporate spam firewall and private blacklists, but luckily there are a few tools that can help you check most of them quickly. We've included here a handy reference with the sites that you can use to check your blacklist status. We've also highlighted several of the more prominent SPAM blacklists.
First and foremost – we'll stress that our series on checking and removing your email servers from a blacklist assumes that you're not spamming — and you've first taken appropriate corrective steps to clean up your email list and email marketing sending practices.
What you need to know to check Blacklist status
Most SPAM blacklists track the reputation of the email servers that are being used to send outgoing email for your domain. So to get started – if your company uses its own servers to send email campaigns, you'll need to know the IP address(es) of the email servers sending emails for your company. If you use an SMTP email service like Sendgrid, or if you use a shared email server form a hosting provider like GoDaddy, then you'll need to know the IP addresses of their servers or specifically – what IP addresses are being used for your company's email. Finally – if you are sending through a top Email Service Provider like Pinpointe, you can probably rest assured that the IP address are likely to be 'clean' – but nontheless the tips here all still apply with respect to checking if your email server is blacklisted.
How Blacklists Monitor Reputation
Several SPAM blacklists monitor the sending reputation of more than just the email server IP address. They also track senders reputation by sending domain, and /or by DKIM identity, and virtually all blacklists now share reputation information among themselves in near real-time.
Checking Public Blacklists
There are over 120 notable public blacklists. A handful are serious and can cause a dramatic fall off in your delivery. Most of the rest will impact delivery over a much smaller scope. Here are 3 sites where you can check the important (and some not so important) public blacklists if you know your servers IP address(es). NOTE: – these are blacklist check aggregators — don't send removal requests to them directly:
