My IP is on the Black List, what to do?

If you manage a website, an e-commerce, it is likely that during the holidays you increased the number of outgoing commercial emails and it is very likely that you have had some problems, if so, you are in the right place to understand why.

https://youtu.be/v3_6D_bd8MM

When we send emails from our website, we can do so in various ways:

using PHP's MAIL function

using your hosting provider's SMTP

using an external SMTP, specific and dedicated to sending commercial communications, which for simplicity, we will call DEM

PHP Mail Function The first method, the PHP mail function, is the simplest, the various CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Prestashop are already configured by default to do this, but this is the least recommended choice, for several reasons:

the outgoing email might look something like This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and the various anti-SPAM systems don't like this, the delivery of your email could be compromised;

the outgoing email would come out of the same server as thousands of other emails, if some of your neighbors send "not too requested" emails or even worse, if other sites on the server are hacked and start sending SPAM, your deliverability, i.e. your ability to deliver a message, will be compromised;

if your CMS were compromised due to some security flaw, it would allow the indiscriminate sending of emails, compromising not only the reputation of the server's IP, but also of your website

do not use PHP's mail function

ask your provider to deactivate it for greater security

Hosting Provider's SMTP The second method, using your hosting provider's SMTP, is the most appropriate choice, but here too, pay attention to the limits. Hosting providers set sending limits, not because they are bad or because they want to profit from the service, but to avoid abuse.

Usually, the outgoing email service (SMTP) included with various shared hosting services includes the ability to send a number of emails per hour or per day and since the infrastructure is shared, it is not recommended to use it for sending mass commercial emails (DEM).

If the user base to which you send emails does not exceed 5,000 contacts, I would say that you can use the service included in the hosting service; for higher numbers, it would be advisable to activate a specific external service.

This second method can also have the same deliverability problems, you are always on a shared infrastructure and therefore other users could dirty the reputation of the IP and cause your outgoing emails to end up in SPAM.

External SMTP The third method, the use of dedicated external services, is a must if you have a list of users that exceeds 5,000 contacts and you often have to send DEMs that must arrive and which must arrive in a short time.

There are thousands of companies in the world that offer these services, we recommend one in particular, which is part of our group and which we know works well: VOLA

How do I resolve deliverability and IP blacklisting issues? So, what about you who have up to 5,000 users to send to and have constant deliverability and IP blacklisting problems? How to do it?

Even at Host we had thousands of customers with this problem, so we created the MailOUT service, which significantly improves the problem of IPs in the blacklist and improves the delebility of emails. Obviously, as in all things, guidelines must be followed.

MailOUT is a service included in all our shared hosting services, so it is free and active immediately;

When you send an email from your CMS, be it an order confirmation or a commercial email, the email passes through MailOUT, which analyzes it, tries to identify whether it is SPAM or not and, if it recognizes it as "good", the delivery, through a battery of geo-localized SMTP servers with very high IP reputations.

Sending the email with a "good" IP is the first rule to follow to deliver an email, but it is not the only one, let's see the others:

have the SPF record configured correctly;

optionally, have a properly configured DKIM record;

respect good rules when creating the email, understood as text, images and content;

"warm up your sender (sender address) to train the MailOUT algorithms (this only applies to Host customers)

We will see in the next video how to address these 4 points and therefore how to improve the deliverability of your emails. For additional information on MailOUT I invite you to visit our website and test the active service on our shared hosting profiles.

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