Help Our domain has been blacklisted (email)

4 points by JOnAgain 13y ago ↗ HN

I'm at a startup and we started having problems with our emails being marked as spam almost a year ago. It's been getting worse since then, and we can't figure out why.For a brief period last year, we had a service that sent emails to customers, but they were solicited -- they put their email in our web UI, we sent an email. 1 email. Rarely a followup. All our emails follow best practices (have an unsubscribe button, etc). We haven't sent any automated emails in over a year.The problem seems to be getting worse, to the point that other people emailing each other about us will have their emails marked as spam -- just for having our domain in the content.We use Google Apps for our email (gmail for business)I don't know nearly enough about this stuff to figure out why we ended up on this blacklist, or how to go about getting us off it. If there's a legitimate problem I'm unaware of, I'd love to find out. I really don't think there is, though.I'm at a loss on what I can do next. The only alternative seems to be to get a new domain unrelated to our company and use that. Really not a palatable option.Anyone else had this problem? How did you fix it?

3 comments

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Tangaroa 13y ago ↗

Try to find out which blacklist you are on, and work with its maintainer to fix the problem. These links might help:

http://senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/rep_lookup

http://rfc-ignorant.org/

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

http://multirbl.valli.org/

Also make sure your email list is double-opt-in so that malicious people cannot sign up other people for email.

fatbat 13y ago ↗

How do you know you are blacklisted? Here is a link to check, http://www.blacklistalert.org/

I am not too familiar with Google Apps mailing but if you have access to the mail logs that would be a good way to backtrack what happened.

The logs usually contain server responses to your sends with instructions/link on how to be "safelisted" or at least a reason of why you were blocked. Determine the domains and go from there.

dholowiski 13y ago ↗

If you want to post your domain name, I'd be happy to have a look and see if there's anything obvious causing the problem. The tools others have listed here should give you at least enough information to know where to start.

Do you pay for google apps? If so, go into the help section - there's a 1800# to call for tech support. Depending on what the problem is, they may or may not be able to fix it (if it's not a google problem), but I would be shocked if they weren't able to tell you why this is happening. (if you don't pay for google apps, it might be worth paying, for the tech support).