A blacklist is a list of domain names or IP addresses that are associated with spam or suspicious email content from untrusted sources; if you keep sending emails to people that didn’t willingly subscribe to your email campaigns, your address will be added to the blacklist, and all your emails will end up in spam.
The blacklist aims to prevent unwanted content or spam from reaching users, so mailbox providers like Outlook and Gmail use this blacklist as a filtering mechanism to detect and block unwanted emails. They also use it to check for a brand’s senders’ reputation to determine if they will allow them to send emails to their account holders. Anti-spam agencies and internet service providers also use blacklists for the same purpose.
Email blacklisting can hurt your email marketing campaigns; if you are blacklisted, it will reduce your email deliverability rate because your emails will always end up in the spam folder, and your audience will not read them. In the long run, you will spend more on email marketing campaigns and get little results. To avoid this, let’s take a look at some actions that can get you blacklisted and how to prevent them.
Why do you Become Blacklisted?
Bad Email List
You can get blacklisted for poor email list hygiene or a stale email list, so you must use reliable email marketing software and be careful while preparing your email list; this will help you monitor your performance and refine your list when needed.
A Huge Number of Spam Complaints
If many recipients mark your emails as spam, email service providers or ISPs will blacklist your email address. The unsubscribe option can help filter uninterested recipients so you will reduce their spam complaints.
Malware Function
If your system is infected by different malware, such as spambots, viruses, and trojans, your emails will not pass the spam filters. So, to prevent this, it is important to run antimalware checks regularly to maintain a clean system.
Spam Traps
Some ISPs use spam traps to identify domain names or IP addresses; the traps act as fraud management tools, and based on their evaluation, the ISP will decide whether to blacklist your IP address or not.
Hackers
Another reason you can get blacklisted is that if hackers get access to your server, they can ruin your reputation by sending spam emails; you can detect this by checking error messages you receive for emails you did not send.
A Sudden Increase in List Size or Volume
An ISP will suspect your IP address if your email list suddenly increases, and they might blacklist you, so to avoid this, do not buy email lists, take your time to build your email list.