How to Remove my IP From a Blacklist and Be Protected?

One minute, you’ve spent a great deal of time and effort on the next big email marketing campaign for your business. You just know it’s going to make the impression you need on your target audience, raising awareness for your brand and getting people excited about your products and services. Then, you’re hit with an unusually high number of undelivered emails. You do some checking and, sadly, confirm the worst:

You’ve been blacklisted.

It’s something that all email marketers fear, but the most important thing to understand is that being on a blacklist is NOT the end of your campaign. You can absolutely request to be removed from that blacklist, and once you have a good reputation, you can even get yourself on some whitelists as well.

In this lesson, you will learn more about topics like:

How to request removal from a blacklist in the right way.
How not to be listed again.
What it means to whitelist your IP and bypass SPAM filters in the future.

Identify if You Are on a Blacklist

If you know that you’ve been added to a blacklist visibility How Can I Find Out If I am On a Blacklist? Being blacklisted isn't just detrimental to your email campaign. It can outright destroy it in most situat... Read more » but aren’t sure which one, the first step is to use a resource like EmailAcademy’s Blacklist Checker or Blacklist Monitor to determine exactly which lists you’ve been added to. These tools will check your IP address against a variety of known blacklists visibility What is a blacklist? An email blacklist is a third-party database containing the IP addresses or domains of people and organiza... Read more » , giving you both an indication of which ones you appear on and which ones you don’t.

How to Remove IP From Blacklist

The most important thing to understand is that each blacklist will vary when it comes to the process of actually getting yourself removed. Most will have a formal removal request available, which will allow you to enter your IP server’s IP address, phone number, and other relevant information.

You’ll be able to provide a little bit more information about your business and a written explanation for why you shouldn’t be on the list at all. Note that once your request is submitted, the actual removal can take anywhere from 24 hours to a few days or so, depending on how frequently the list is updated.

It’s equally important to note that some blacklists don’t allow you to remove yourself from the list manually. In that case, you will be automatically removed after a specific period of time has passed so long as you have no longer engaged in any other SPAM or suspicious activity.

Avoiding Blacklists

If you want to avoid being blacklisted in the future, there are a number of critical steps to keep in mind.

First, do not send any unsolicited bulk emails from your email server for any reason.
Never send an email without correctly set up SPF.
Send relevant emails that your subscribers want to read.
Ensure that all of your email hosts are as secure as possible and don’t use an Internet service provider with a bad reputation for SPAM-related activities. Doing so might get you blacklisted through no fault of your own, but simply because your IP address is part of a group that was all lumped in together.
Always use secure connections (like SSL) whenever possible, and never allow any unauthenticated users to send emails from your accounts.

How to Whitelist IP

Some services offer IP whitelisting services. One of these whitelisting with an outstanding reputation is ISIPP.

Being certified with ISIPP includes being listed in their certified by Suretymail’ DNS reputation zones. They get queried millions of times an hour by ISP’s, spam filters, and other servers worldwide. And, if those receivers see that a customer’s sending IP address is certified with ISIPP, they care quite a bit, especially as they don’t just let them know that the IP address is certified with ISIPP, but also in response to that DNS query, why the customer is certified - in other words “what that customer is doing right” ISIPP worked closely with Spam Assassin on this structure, it’s why they are baked into each Spam Assassin distro. It’s why they have consistently had the best scores in Spam Assassin.