You Don’t Want to Be on a Blocklist’s Radar

We recently had one of our email certification customers ask us whether we would contact all of the blocklists listed on a particular site, on their behalf, because the site listed their IP address’ reputation with these blocklists as “neutral”.

In other words, they wanted to know if we could raise their reputation from neutral to positive with the blocklists.

Of course, what they were seeing meant that they are not listed on the blocklists, which is a good thing. There was no action required. Indeed, there was almost no action that could be taken.

But this does highlight how very unaware many senders are of exactly what the various lists do, and mean, and of their own relationship to these lists.

This is an important thing to keep in mind when dealing with your own sending customers, or your own sending staff.

The general rule of thumb is:

– Blocklists: You don’t want to be on their radar. Having them have no idea who you are is a good thing.

– Whitelists: Being on them is a good thing. But it is not necessarily a necessary thing. If you are not having problems with email delivery, then not being on a given whitelist isn’t really hurting you – today. But it can ward off potential problems tomorrow. That said, email whitelists tend to be very localized to smaller and corporate mail servers.

– Sender Certification Lists (us and Validity): Being on them is the best thing, because being on either our or Validity’s certification list means that you are certified as a good sender, with a good reputation.