Email marketers, here’s a question for you- at the end of the day, when you spend countless hours conferring with your copywriters, designers, and developers to craft the perfect email marketing campaign, what is the bare minimum that you expect of it? That it at least breaks into your customers’ inboxes, right? Well, we are here to tell you that it’s not as straightforward as it might seem. In order to compete with the thousands of other businesses also vying for your customer’s attention, you first need to be in the fray. What can prevent that? You getting blacklisted. 

Although there’s no official study to back it (yet), we are pretty sure that most email marketers’ nightmares comprise being marked as spam or listed on a blacklist. Besides sucking the life out of your hard work, getting blacklisted deals a body blow to your brand reputation too. So, how do you escape this fate? By getting subscribers to whitelist your email address. Today, we’ll be taking a deep dive into email whitelisting, acquainting you with everything you need to know about it!

Table Of Contents:

  • Understanding The Email Blacklist
  • Reasons You Could Get Blacklisted
  • What Should Your Response Be To Getting Blacklisted?
  • What is Email Whitelisting?
  • Why Should You Ask Your Subscribers To Whitelist You?
  • Whitelisting an Email in Gmail
  • Whitelisting an Email in Outlook
  • Whitelisting an Email in Apple Mail
  • Whitelisting an Email in Yahoo Mail
  • Whitelisting an Email Address in AOL
  • Whitelisting an Email Address in ProtonMail
  • Email Whitelisting Best Practices
  • Wrapping It Up

Understanding The Email Blacklist

Email blacklist is a real-time list or database that contains all domains and IP addresses that have a reputation for sending spam. Simply put, it functions as a filter, determining which emails can reach their designated inboxes and which not. ISPs (Internet Service Providers), anti-spam vendors, and other similar organisations make use of this list to keep spam at bay. As terrifying as it is to be identified on a blacklist, one also has to admit that they are incredibly useful. Of the massive volume of emails that are exchanged daily, approximately 85% of it is considered spam. Thanks to blacklists, these unwanted messages are kept from flooding subscribers’ inboxes.

So, which are the companies that compile these valuable blacklists? Let’s take a look.

  • Spamhaus: Among the leading names in this field, Spamhaus’ multiple lists- SBL Spamhaus Block List, DBL Domain Block List, XBL Exploits Block List, and PBL Policy Block List- are used extensively by ISPs and organizations across the globe. The entries in Spamhaus lists consist of spam trap addresses and the IPs and known addresses of spammers. Many purchased lists contain the spam tram addresses that are identified by Spamhaus.
  • Invalument: Invalument maintains three blacklists- ivmSIP, ivmURI, and ivmSIP/24. Each of these lists tracks different information.
  • Spamcop: Spamcop makes their lists by taking stock of spam reports and spamtrap addresses. Additionally, they follow a system wherein points are assigned to email addresses on the basis of spam complaints before they are added to the lists.
  • Barracuda: Email addresses that spam companies selling data, email security hardware, and online software contribute majorly to Barracuda lists. 

Although there are many other companies in the picture, too, the lists provided by these four vendors are the ones that are primarily used by businesses out there. As an email marketer thus, your aim should be to avoid making an appearance here at all costs.

Reasons That Could Get You Blacklisted

The definition of spam is subjective and can vary a lot from one ISP or blacklist vendor to another. Different blacklists adhere to separate policies and rules to identify spam. Below, we have listed some of the most common reasons for getting blacklisted.

  • Fraudulent activity: This is one of the primary reasons that lead to an email address getting blacklisted. Hackers and cyber attackers either take illicit control of or spoof verified email addresses to conduct a host of fraudulent activities, including phishing, malware, hacking, ransomware, and the like. Subsequently, this earns these addresses a position on blacklists.
  • Subscriber complaints: A lot of the time, you get blacklisted because your recipients mark your emails as spam. Higher the count of spam complaints against you, greater is the probability of your IP being identified on a blacklist.
  • Email list malpractices: Often, in the quest of expanding their reach and visibility, some businesses fall prey to the temptation of buying email lists, a practice that is strongly frowned upon within the email community. The contacts on such lists have either not heard of your business or consented to receive your communications. So, when you send them an email, it is obvious that they’ll be inclined to click the spam button. Simply put, buying email lists doesn’t fetch you more customers but more spam complaints. All of this eventually leads to you getting blacklisted.
  • Spam trap penalties: Produced and maintained by major email ISPs (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo) and the DNSBL (Domain Name System-based blackhole list), spam traps are bot emails that are deployed to lay hold of spammers. Since they aren’t present on public platforms such as websites, they don’t pose any threat to legitimate email senders. They are hidden alongside defunct or fraudulent email addresses that are harvested by spammers who make email lists out of them. When marketers buy these lists and attempt to reach out to the leads on them, their emails inevitably hit the spam trap addresses. Following this, the sender instantly gets flagged and added to a blacklist. The best way to identify spam traps is to track the email engagement of your sent emails. Because they are bots, these email addresses will register no interaction with your messages. There are four kinds of spam traps distributed across the internet- Classic spam traps, Typo domain-based spam traps, Seeded spam traps, and Recycled email address-based spam traps.
  • Inorganic email list growth: You can’t build a high-quality email list overnight; it is a gradual process. If your list happens to grow by an exponential margin within a short time span, there can only be two explanations behind it- a miracle or a purchased list. More often than not, it is the latter. Inorganic surges in the list size can earn you the suspicion of ISPs and ESPs (Email Service Providers) alike, eventually pushing them to blacklist you.
  • Mass email sending: One of the many reasons why the batch and blast email technique has gone out of vogue is the high number of spam complaints that it invites. When you send the same email to a large group of people, it goes without saying that it won’t resonate with everyone. And the disgruntled ones have got nothing to lose by flagging you as spam. Forget the recipients, just the act of sending an irrationally high volume of emails is enough to attract the roving eye of ESPs. It’s not suspicious when your email list has genuinely grown over time, and you have gone from sending, say, 100 emails to 1000 emails within 4-5 months. However, if someone sends a dozen emails today, 5000 the following day, and 50,000 the day after, something’s definitely fishy. 
  • Unmaintained email lists: An unhygienic email list is one of the main culprits behind you getting blacklisted. Not spending enough time cleaning your email list means you risk harboring uninterested, dormant, or inactive subscribers. Sending emails regularly to such contacts severely affects your sender reputation. Maintaining the hygiene of your email list, thus, is imperative to improving your email deliverability.
  • Poor email content: Your email content also plays a significant role in determining whether you get blacklisted or not. Most ISPs reject emails whose text is in all caps and overly punctuated. Additionally, the presence of unnecessarily colored fonts and excessive visuals are considered to be potential red flags as well. In some cases, too many spelling errors can also cause the readers to question the sender’s credibility.

What Should Your Response Be To Getting Blacklisted?

Nobody wants to be blacklisted, of course, but given the abundance of blacklists out there, there’s a very good chance that you will inevitably find your IP address on a list at one point or the other. The top ISPs use the lists created by the principal blacklist vendors mentioned above. So, if you don’t feature on any of those, you actually don’t have much to worry about. Being identified by smaller blacklists won’t hamper your reach and visibility all that much. In fact, give it a few weeks, and your address might just drop off altogether.

On some occasions, a mistake as trivial as misspelling your recipient’s email address can get you blacklisted. You can resolve this by requesting blacklist removal. In other instances, however, getting blacklisted is a definite indicator of a chink in your email marketing armor. Hence, it is important that you try to get right underneath the matter the moment you get notified. Try and analyze what could have possibly gone wrong. Is it something you wrote in your email? Or does the problem lie with your email list? Therefore, in many ways, getting blacklisted alerts you to serious flaws in your email marketing strategy and presents you with an opportunity to fix them.

Getting flagged by a major blacklist vendor is not an irreversible process; you are allowed to request a removal. If it’s a personal IP address, all you have to do is visit their websites and learn everything relevant to the removal process. In most cases, it’s a fairly straightforward affair as long as you pay heed to what they say regarding cleaning up your lists and emails. If you’re mailing via ESPs, they will voluntarily instruct you on what you need to do to rectify the issue. That’s not all; they will also get in touch with the blacklist companies to have their IP addresses dropped off. The bottom line is, getting blacklisted is not the end of the world, so long you play your cards right. 

What Is Email Whitelisting?

As you might have guessed from the name already, email whitelist is the exact opposite of a blacklist- a database of all the approved email addresses, names, and contact numbers allowed to be delivered to customers’ inboxes. When your recipients add your email address to their whitelist, they essentially inform your email client that they trust you. As a result, your emails make their way smoothly into their inboxes without being parsed by any spam filters. From a subscriber’s point of view, when you whitelist a particular address, you ensure that you never miss any emails from them. Hence, email whitelisting is beneficial for email marketers and subscribers alike. 

Why Should You Ask Your Subscribers To Whitelist You?

If you truly want your email campaigns to reap their desired dividends, you must urge your customers to whitelist you. The following reasons will surely give you more of an incentive. 

  • Getting whitelisted reduces the chances of your emails getting wrongly flagged as spam, or junk mail, doing a whole world of good for your email deliverability in the process. 
  • It guarantees that your emails will definitely land in your subscribers’ inboxes. Subsequently, the number of people interacting with your campaign will go up, ultimately paving the path for improved results. 
  • Occasionally, subscribers miss important communication from their favorite brands simply because they haven’t added them to their whitelist. Whitelisting helps them prevent this.

The moral of the story is you should never pass up an opportunity to encourage your recipients to whitelist you- be it in your welcome emails, as a concluding thought in your promotional emails, or even through a separate dedicated email sequence. 

If you’re wondering how to go about it, take a look at this email from Go Outdoors.

This welcome email from Go Outdoors includes a prominent reminder for their readers to whitelist them. But, this is not the only instance where they do so. Their future emails carry this message as well, albeit not as loudly. Here’s how it looks.