What is an Email Blacklist? – Why You Need Email Verification

Let’s answer the title question, “What is an Email Blacklist?” Blacklisting occurs when an email address, domain or ISP is flagged for spam and blocked from sending messages to certain users. Internet and email service providers maintain a list of blacklisted addresses and will block any emails sent from these addresses from reaching the users of their service.

How does a company get blacklisted?

Blacklisting can occur after an email address is marked as spam enough times, receives a consistently high bounce-back rate (usually resulting from outdated or incorrect email addresses), or when ISPs see a sudden increase in email volume. For all these reasons, blacklists can place you on their list and block your content from reaching your targeted audience.

What are the effects of getting blacklisted?

Blacklisting is typically a temporary measure that your email address or sender domain will eventually recover from. However, the process to fix it in a timely manner is extraordinarily difficult. And until that happens, your company will suffer the consequences. Perhaps the hardest to bounce back from is the impression that was left on your customers. After being blacklisted, you not only miss out on the temporary block to customers, but your company misses those important sales opportunities, lead nurturing and customer service correspondence. Missing the mark on any of these valuable customer interactions could lead to the termination of their relationship with your company.

How can email verification help a company avoid the blacklist?

Being blacklisted indicates that your address book needs to be updated and verified. With a tool like Melissa’s Global Email Verification, you can remove up to 95% of bad emails from your list with real-time processing. Real-time verification pings each email to ensure it is active and can receive mail. It will also correct any typos like syntax errors, domain names and illegal characters that lead to high bounce rates. Corrections and validations such as these will dramatically decrease your vulnerability to blacklisting.

Our Email Verification Service offers two levels, depending on your speed and accuracy needs:

• Global Email Premium provides real-time email mailbox checking domain-specific logic as well as SMTP commands and other proprietary mechanisms to validate inboxes live. This can take up to 12 seconds per email address. Our built-in “time-to-wait” option allows you to customize how long you want customers to wait for a real-time validation.
• Global Email Express offers higher speeds and performance than Premium by using a cached inbox validation database of known good and bad emails. All emails sent to the service will also be cached so they can be re-evaluated within a 90-day cycle.

With updated and verified email addresses, customer outreach opportunities increase, marketing initiatives are realized and analytics are more possible than ever before. There are also tools that can update addresses if consumers have changed their email address.

An Email Change of Address Service allows you to retain those valuable customers who you have formed a relationship with but have changed their email addresses. You just send your bounced-back list in and Melissa can find their new email addresses that are deliverable and updated for your records.