How Can I Check if My Email Address Is Blacklisted

By Harry Long

In today’s digital landscape, maintaining a good email reputation is crucial for effective communication and successful outreach. If your domain has been blacklisted, it can severely impact your email deliverability, leading to missed opportunities and frustrated recipients.

So, why might your email address be blacklisted? Common reasons include sending too many emails in a short period, having a poor engagement rate, or being flagged for spam-like behaviour.

Understanding the implications of a blacklisted email address is essential, as it can hinder your ability to reach clients, partners, and customers.

In this blog, we’ll guide you through the process to check if your email address is blacklisted, explore the various methods for verification, and provide actionable steps to resolve the issue if your address has indeed been flagged. By the end, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to protect your email reputation and ensure you consistently reach your intended audience.

Fear not – we ourselves have had sending email domains blacklisted, and following our step by step process we have reversed the blacklist and returned to healthy deliverability rates.

You are in very safe hands …

How to check if you are blacklisted

Firstly, it’s important to understand the levels at which you can be blacklisted. Both your IP Address and email domain can be blacklisted. The cause of either will be very similar, but the steps you need to take to resolve it (later on) differ, so you need to first understand if it’s your IP address or email domain that is blacklisted.

That’s why we use a tool called MX Toolbox (mxtoolbox.com) – no partnership or preferred reason in recommending them beyond them being the best and free. We’ve tried a few tools and found this to be the most accurate and effective.

Their blacklist check allows you to see if your domain or IP address is listed on various email blacklists.

Enter first your sending domain to check for blacklists on that, and then check your IP address.

What to do if you’re on a blacklist

If you’re on one of these blacklists, it’s a strong indicator that your fundamentals are seriously off. It could even mean your email infrastructure has been compromised by a third party. This is very very rare but still a possibility.

The good news is that you can request removal from these blacklists.

However, before doing this it is essential that you review your sending practices, fundamentals, and proceed with the next steps I’m going to detail. As if you don’t fix the problem that caused the blacklist in the first place – your removal request will be denied and sender reputation further affected.

After confirming that your fundamentals are good then reach out to the blacklist and gain further insight. You will be able to find out what has caused the blacklist.

Step 1: Fix the fundamentals

1. DNS records

SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) must be configured correctly to ensure deliverability.

You can find these on the platform where you purchased your domain.

My advice: always consult an expert. It’s critical to only have just one SPF record, ensure DMARC isn’t set to “none,” and verify that DKIM is accurate.

If your DNS settings are off, that’s likely the root of your issues. Stop sending, get an expert to fix it, and warm up your email accounts for 3-4 weeks before resuming.

2. Domain selection

Stick to clean, straightforward domains, avoiding unnecessary symbols or low-performing suffixes.

For UK companies, we only recommend .co.uk and .com.

3. Email account names

Always use a real name. Avoid the temptation to create generic functions like ‘sales@’ or ‘marketing@’.

For example, at leadR, we use variations of Neil MacLean, like ‘neil@’, ‘neilmaclean@’, or ‘neil.maclean@’.

4. Number of users

It’s best practice to have no more than 4-5 email accounts per domain.

Any more than that and you risk exceeding sending limits for the domain.

5. Email copy

Does your email copy sound too salesy?

Run your content through a spam word checker like Mail Meteor (mailmeteor.com) or Folderly (folderly.com) to ensure it’s not getting flagged. While not 100% accurate, this can definitely help.

Does your email include personalisation?

There are smart ways to add personalisation using AI, beyond just inserting the company name. There are plenty of people on LinkedIn giving away their strategies for free.

Is your subject line hurting open rates?

Your subject line’s tone depends on your email’s purpose. From our experience, something subtle and non-salesy tends to perform well.

How long is your email copy?

Avoid sending long convoluted emails that look like essays. People have short attention spans when it comes to their email inbox, so keep it short and clear.

Does your copy match the person reading?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of writing in your own voice rather than your prospect’s. Always use language they understand and relate to.

Some of this stuff might seem like overkill – but it is simply essential. You copy and subject line play just as big a part as some of the more technical stuff like DNS records and domains.

Step 2: Reach out to the blacklist

After confirming that your fundamentals are good then reach out to the blacklist and gain further insight. You will be able to find out what has caused the blacklist.

It’s important you’ve followed the above best practices first because this is when the review starts.

If they come back giving you a specific reason beyond what you’ve already fixed (this will be rare as the most common causes are all included in our guide), change it and move to step 3.

Step 3 – Request removal from the blacklist

You should now be in a good position to be removed from the blacklist. Sometimes this will happen naturally overtime, but to speed up the process I recommend reaching out to them and requesting this. It puts you on the front foot and will definitely speed up the process greatly.

As you’ve probably now have realised (if you hadn’t already) email deliverability is one hell of a minefield. You can never be 100% sure what exactly is causing it, so just be sure to maintain and optimise a healthy email sending process and infrastructure that gives you the best chance to avoid blacklists in the future.

If you’d benefit from bespoke tailored advice on this from our team of experts please get in touch below.

Equally, we can help in wider cold outreach. If you’re reading this you most likely do cold outreach already. What we do is create personalised videos for outreach at scale. We help sales team replace their outdated text outreach emails with engaging, personalised outreach videos.