E-Mail Spam Blacklist : Are You On One?

What is an Email Spam Blacklist?

Spam blacklists are lists of IP addresses used to keep track of servers that have been known to send out large amounts of spam (unsolicited email). These IP's could come from your ISP (Internet Service Provider), since they typically offer email accounts and/or websites with their service plans. It's therefore not uncommon for spammers to take advantage of these accounts. Large ISP's especially are more likely to harbor spammers simply due to the large number of subscribers.

It's important to know if the IP address your sending mail from is on a blacklist, because it will impact how many people receive your emails. If you're sending an important email to someone, you want to make sure it arrives and doesn't end up in junk folder after junk folder. If you're running your own web server, you especially want to make sure your IP is not on a blacklist because you don't want your customers getting spam blocked. This will hurt your email service reputation. If you're a casual user with a free email address such as Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail, you also want to make sure you received an IP block that hasn't been blacklisted. While educational (.edu) email accounts are less susceptible to being blacklisted, no one is immune. Regardless of the origin of your email account, you want to make sure you haven't been blacklisted.

How Can You Tell If You're On a Spam Blacklist?

Visit the MX Toolbox Blacklist Check page and enter the IP address of your server to see if it's been blacklisted.

Are you Hosting Emails? 

If you're a web designer or hosting provider and want to host your own emails, without having to deal with the headache of providing tech support to email clients that are facing blacklist issues, consider signing up for Rackspace Email. You can get 5 mailboxes for as little as $10/ month. They offer 24/7/365 phone support, white-listed email servers, spam filtering using the Cloudmark system, and more.

Take the headache of having to stand by the phone and answer the same question over and over again, and offer your clients reliable email service. You'll recognize the Rackspace name - the same company known for its high level, fully managed hosting packages. They bought the email specialist company Mailtrust a couple years back and enhanced their service offerings with dedicated Rackspace support personnel.

Looking to Stop Spam to your Outlook or Outlook Express Inbox?

Check out Spam Bully for free - it lets you fight and control spam, freeing up your day for more important tasks. Spam Bully offers: 

• Bayesian Spam Filter - Intelligently knows which emails you've received are good and which are spam by using artificial intelligence and server blacklists. Makes sure good emails make it to your Inbox.
• Allow/Block List - Decide who and what makes it into your Inbox.
• Punish/Bounce/Report/Challenge - Get back at spammers by increasing their costs, returning their spam, and reporting them to the servers they came from and the FTC. Email a special password to an unfamiliar sender that they must correctly type in before their email is allowed to your Inbox.
• Auto-Delete - Optionally you can just delete spam messages instead of sorting them to a spam folder. You never have to see a spam message again.
• Cellphone Forwarding - Forward only good email to your cell phone.
• Statistics - Comprehensive graphing and statistics shows you how well SpamBully is working.
• Multi-Language Interface - Easily and automatically convert Spam Bully into English, Spanish, German.

You can try it for free. Give Spam Bully a try now!