Email Blacklist: How to Check and What to Do If You’re Blacklisted

Why Is My Email Address Blacklisted?

An email blacklist is a database with email addresses, IP addresses, and domain names that are known to send spam.

One of the most well-known email blacklists is the Composite Blocking List (CBL) by Spamhaus. As explained on its website, “the CBL lists IPs exhibiting characteristics which are specific to open proxies of various sorts and dedicated Spam BOTs which have been abused to send spam.” Other prominent email blacklists include SpamCop, MultiRBL, SURBL, and Invaluement, just to name a few.

Email blacklists are used by everyone from email service providers like Google and Microsoft to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon to prevent spam emails from entering their servers and annoying their customers.

There are many ways how an email address, IP address, or a domain name can end up on an email blacklist:

• Hacked account: Perhaps the most common reason why legitimate email users end up blacklisted is that their accounts get hacked and used by spammers to send spam emails. Often, the rightful owners notice only when the amount of available free email storage space reaches zero due to the large number of sent emails.
• Email spoofing: Believe it or not, but it’s quite easy to create email messages with a forged sender address. Such messages appear to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the real source, and you can probably already see why spammers would find them useful.
• Dirty email list: If you use email for marketing purposes, you probably have a list of email addresses that you use to distribute emails and newsletters. There’s nothing bad about email lists, but you need to ensure that your email list doesn’t contain any old, fake, or illegitimate email addresses that would generate zero engagement.
• Too many outbound emails: If you typically send just one or two emails per week and suddenly send more than a hundred emails in a single day, your email service provider is very likely to suspect that you’re up to no good, banning your email address from sending further emails until you complete an email blacklist removal.
• Too many complaints: Email providers often blacklist email addresses because they send emails that get marked as spam or get immediately deleted without even being opened. High complaint rates are often produced by sending emails to recipients who have not completed an opt-in, and such practice is actually illegal in many countries.

How to Check Email Blacklist Databases with MXToolBox

This is how you can check your email address with MXToolBox:

1. Go to https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
2. Enter your server IP or domain name and click the “Blacklist Check” button to perform an email blacklist check.
3. After a few seconds, you should see a long list of popular email blacklists with status messages right next to them. If all blacklists display the “OK” message, your email address isn’t blacklisted.

Conclusion

“Is my email blacklisted?” isn’t a difficult question to answer because there are many free email blacklist checkers that you can use to instantly see if your email address has ended up on an email blacklist. Of course, discovering that your email address has, indeed, been blacklisted is just the first step toward email blacklist removal. To successfully remove a blacklisted email address from all email blacklists, you need to change what’s wrong and contact the owners of the corresponding email blacklists. You should also verify that both your computer and your inbox are clean, which you can do using any popular malware removal tool and Clean Email, an easy-to-use inbox organizer.