Hi guys. My IP address has been blacklisted for some unknown reasons. Can anyone tell me where can I find resources to delist my IP address? Also, are there any tools which provide a step-by-step guide on how to delist?
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Hi @nishchal, There are tools to check the status of your IP or domain blocklist. But even before applying for delisting, it is important to understand why even your IP got into those blocklists.
Unless the root cause is identified and fixed, there is a high chance of you getting listed repeatedly which can lead to EML (Email Marketing Lockdown) stage.
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Hi,
Alternatively you can use this one too:
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx
Check commands, first one is blacklist.
Good Luck.
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Thanks, @geniusdibya,
This tool looks complete treasure for exploring email blacklist, but I have seen the delisting steps do they delist real-time? any idea?
Yes.
Your link is also correct.
What I meant is, the supertool will help you to diagnose everything.
If you use the command blacklist:yourdomain.com , than you can get the info you need.
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Hi @joeyk, I went to MXToolBox but it doesn’t provide a step-by-step guide on how to delist. It just displays them.
Hi @geniusdibya, almost all the tools that I’ve found online only list the DNSBL’s for me. Will the tool mentioned by you help in providing a step-by-step guide to delete my listed IP? And what exactly do you mean by root cause?
There are multiple reasons for one to get listed in blocklists. Few most common reasons are:
- Hitting Spam Traps
- Sending emails with high bounce rates
- High spam/abuse complaint rates
All these are negative engagement metrics in email marketing, which mostly gets an IP or domain into blocklists.
So, it is important to identify which of your email list is having the problem and from exactly which email campaign, all these problems started.
This detailed analysis will give you a clear picture on when this listing happened, and what exactly encouraged that. Once you can fix this root cause, you can go ahead with the delisting steps. And, yes, the tool helps with the delisting resources.
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Yes, because its a tidious process.
- some blacklists you can get delisted automatically (Spameatingmonkey)
- some has a delisting form
- some won’t delist you ever.
Also: there is a difference between IP blacklist and Domain blacklist.
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I appreciate your detailed response. I’d let you know if the tool you mentioned helped me in delisting my IP.
Thanks @joeyk, I appreciate your response. I hope I’ll find a tool which helps me in delisting. I’ll let you know asap when I find one. I’m testing one of them in the meantime.
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Once I thought that my IP is blacklisted, because sereral MX tools told me so.
But I was/am not. I have two internet connections. One is DSL (dial-up) with alternating IP adersses and one ist DSL (dial-up) with fixed IP address. Dial-up connections like DSL and others where IP adresses change are generally not defined as MX IP adresses. It depends from the definition of the IP Range that your provider publishes. If your provider does not mark your IP address (range) with a kind of MX flag, your ip address will be blacklistet by MX tools and mailsservers do not accept mails from your IP.
Maybe it helps finding the reason for your “blacklisting”.
Hi,
i could not see in your posts how you exactly send you mails, but i suppose you have your own linux mailserver which handles the mails. If this is right you could have a look in the logfiles of you mailserver. At linux for sending mails often postfix is used. At my debian linux servers it writes all communication to the logfile /var/log/mail.log
If one of my dedicated linux server for a customer with mautic gets blacklisted from a provider like t-online in germany, i will see it in the postfix logfile like:
Jun 28 00:56:54 skom postfix/smtp[13413]: 3D6D440AE3: host mx02.t-online.de[123.123.123.123] refused to talk to me: 554 IP=111.111.111.111 - A problem occurred. (Ask your postmaster for help or to contact tosa@rx.t-online.de to clarify.) (BL)
There could be other error codes like “550"”, “5.7.1” and often you will the the email-adress to which sendmail ist not able to send mails, because of the blocking.
Like in my example with t-online you can send a mail to the abuse adress of the provider and ask for a delisting of your ip. But you have to explain why you think its really ok to do it 
In germany for example for t-online normally get an answer with 1-2 hours and after 2 hours the ip is delisted.
Ofen you also will see a link to a webpage in the logfile where the provider explains how you can get more infos and how you can ask for delisting.
The main reason why my linux servers with mautic got blocked at the beginning was, that the “reverse DNS/PTR entry” for the server-ip did not points at the same (sub-)domain i used for email sending. For example if the server IP is 123.123.123.123 and i use info@companyxyz.com for sending mails with mautic, the reverse DNS/PTR entry" for 123.123.123.123 should be for example mail.companyxyz.com.
You can check the reverse DNS/PTR entry for a ip also with https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx
I also set the “HELO/EHLO” for postfix to “mail.companyxyz.com”.
What you also should use is SPF, DKIM and DMARC in the dns settings of your domain. This way you also show the mailproviders, that you do a lot to prevent that your server/domain is used for spam.
And if you use a new IP adress for sending mails, you should “warm up” your IP. Means that you slowly increase your mail sending volume from day to day and that you should not start directly with sending a newsletter to some thousand at the first day.
I also configured my sendmail mailserver, that the amount of mails it sends to the same provider-domain (like @gmail.com) within a short period is limited. For example if my customer sends out a newsletter to 1000 receivers and if 200 are @gmail.com adresses, the mailserver will wait some seconds, after it sends the next mail to a @gmail.com adress. But the limit is only per domain, so only the mails to the same domain will be delayed a little bit. Id did this because if my sendmail is sending to fast, i also saw errors in the sendmail-logfile that different providers told the server “do not send so fast”
And of course its good, if you use the “bounce” function in mautic, so that it removed/blocks mailadress which bounced, because as i know different mailproviders also do not like it if you send mails again and again to the same adresses which for example do not exist anymore.
You can have a look at https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en to see for example what gmail likes and you also can use https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6227174 to get mor infos what google thinks about the ip of you server.
Of course if you use email sending providers like amazon ses, sendgrid … then you do not have to setup all the things i wrote about, but then you have to pay for each mail.
I hope my post helps you or other people, who want to use their own mailservers
Matthias
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