Over just the past few weeks, we have had a distinct escalation of outbound emails being blocked.  This has happened to a number of clients, using various Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and with large email providers. 

The causes seem to vary, but boil down to two main issues.

  1. SPAM is being received by networks, thus the receiving network blocks not only the domains that sent the email, but the IP address, and in somecases ranges of IP addresses, and even whole networks.
  2. Filters are become more proactive, scanning for SPAM on the outbound emails, not just the inbound emails.

We recently had an issue where the our email provider for most of our clients, Everyone.net, was blocked by some of the largest email receivers in the world. All caused by a few bad apples.  The blacklist was noticed by a number of clients and took more than 12 hours to fix.

“The blacklist by Hotmail, MSN and Earthlink has been lifted and all issues resolved. Everyone.net cleared and locked all accounts causing the blacklisting this morning by approximately 9:30 am PT. While Everyone.net worked with Microsoft to clear the block, Microsoft temporarily rate limited Everyone.net. All emails sent that did not receive a non-deliverable error message will be delivered.”

What can you do?

Well, don’t SPAM….. most of you do not, and we have found over the last few issues, that a real SPAMMERS have probably caused the problems.  There is nothing we can really do about that, so with most of the problems we have seen, we are at the mercy of the larger networks to fix the problem.

Make sure you have SPAM, VIRUS, FISHING, SPYWEAR, protection on all of your computers.  If you get a virus, they want to multiply, and many time that means they will SPAM out of your email box.

Make sure to have an internal email policy for your staff, so that your company doesn’t accidently get blacklisted. Suggestions for Your Company’s Email Policy

Send out “clean” emails. We have had a few situations where outbound emails were being blocked by filters because their “signature block” had too much custom coding.  Suggestions on formating your Email Signature block.