Several clients have recently reported their emails being added to blacklists and blocked from the major servers and other events that severely hamper their ability to do business. One client had her IP address blocked by 6 different blacklists and was unable to send email through any of her accounts.
So what do you do? First find out if you are on any of the black lists. You’ll need to know what your IP address is. Go to MXToolbox.com and find the IP for your MX record. Then use their tool to quickly search and see if you are coming up on any of the blacklists or use BlacklistCheck.
If you are on a Blacklist from ATT, Earthlink or Netcom you can send an email to one of their users and you’ll get a "bounceback" message. Simply follow instructions in the email to get added to the whitelist and removed from the blacklist.
Other services like AOL and Cox are tougher and you may have to work with your hosting provider to get the situation resolved. If you’re on Lunarpages (as I am) you can email support and ask them to intervene for you. Lunarpages has been great about this for me. Often times it’s not your actual account that is the problem but another user on the same server and your hosting company may have to deal with that individual to stop whatever they are doing that got you blacklisted in the first place!
Be patient and persistent. Some services can take weeks to take you off the blacklist and there’s not much you can do about it but wait and keep bugging them. It’s a good idea to have a back up email on another server just in case you need it.
If none of the above works, here’s a good list of things you can do to get off blacklists with specific information on each of the major blacklists.
MXToolbox also has a free monitoring service that will alert you if your server goes down, you get blacklisted and to generally monitor server performance.It’s worth it to at least know why your emails aren’t being answered!
