Someone’s making a list and checking it twice, but it isn’t Santa. Due to rising e-mail abuse and spam, hundreds of servers at various companies now monitor e-mail accounts to make sure those accounts are not sending out mass e-mails.
If that e-mail account is assumed to be sending spam it is put on the “blacklist.”
Once on the blacklist, your e-mail account is virtually SHUT DOWN because your e-mail is blocked by hundreds or thousands of servers and your message can’t be delivered.
Big companies who give out e-mail addresses like AOL, Google, and Comcast, for example, will cut off e-mail service to anyone who sends an e-mail to a large number of people at once.
Because of this, even if you or your employees innocently send a message to 100 of your clients, you could be without e-mail for days or weeks.
So, how do you prevent this costly and frustrating downtime from happening to you?
Read these tips to find out:
Protect Your Server
Spammers LOVE to find e-mail servers that don’t have a proper firewall, anti-virus, and intrusion protection.
They get a high from hacking into these servers and then using them to send out thousands of e-mails. Plus, with no protection in place, tracking and catching these spammers is nearly impossible.
The right protection will also prevent malware from being installed on your server, which can automatically send spam without human interaction.
Don’t Allow Employees To Forward Messages
Unless it is for work –only related purposes, make a policy that no one is to forward messages like jokes, photos, or videos outside the company.
If just four of your employees send out this kind of an e-mail to 30 of their contacts, that’s well over 100 people receiving junk mail on the same day from the same e-mail server. This puts you at high risk of being blacklisted.
Have Your Clients And Prospects “Opt-In”
Sometimes companies end up on the blacklist because someone on your list complained and reported your message as spam.
If you have your clients and prospects agree via an opt-in form that they want to receive communication from you and confirm their permission, then you’ll have better protection against that.
Also make sure you keep good records of these optins. That way, even if you do get blacklisted, you should be back up and running fairly quickly.
Make Sure Your E-mail Is Set-up Properly
In addition to protecting yourself from hackers and invasions with software and firewalls, you also need to be sure that your e-mail is configured correctly and set-up to block outside relays.
If you’ve got the wrong setting in your e-mail account, you could wind up blacklisted, without any e-mail for days or weeks.
Keep Your E-mail List Up-To-Date
If someone asks to be removed from your list and you ontinue to send messages to him, the chances of him reporting your company as a spammer is pretty high.
Avoid this by using in-house lists (instead of purchasing one) and contracting your list to verify the information.
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