How to Get on a Whitelist
Monday, November 26th, 2007 by rubypdf|
Even though the email industry is moving toward authentication and certification to separate spammers and phishers from legitimate senders, “whitelists” and “blacklists” are still the first line of defense for many ISPs and individual users. They use both lists to determine whether your email gets delivered as you intend, to the inbox instead of the junk folder and with images intact instead of blocked. Essentially, the whitelist allows your email in, and the blacklist keeps it out. This month, we’ll show you how to get on a whitelist. Check back next month to learn how to stay off or get off a blacklist. How to Seek ISP Whitelisting ISP whitelists usually include these kinds of data:
Desktop clients such as Outlook and Eudora rely on individual users to compile whitelists. However, Web clients AOL and Yahoo! Mail allow you to apply for whitelisting status. MSN/Hotmail uses Bonded Sender data to determine whether and where to filter email. For other ISPs, look on their corporate Web sites for “postmaster” or bulk-email information and see if they offer whitelisting. Whitelisting doesn’t guarantee that your email will be delivered the way you want, but it improves the odds. Yahoo! Mail: In addition to individual whitelists based on the user’s address book, Yahoo! Mail operates a general whitelist.
AOL Like Yahoo!, AOL has a systemwide whitelist. It doesn’t guarantee that whitelisted senders will always get their messages delivered to the inbox instead of the junk folder. But, whitelisted senders who meet stricter volume and complain criteria might qualify for AOL’s enhanced whitelist. Email messages from those senders show up with hotlinks and images enabled instead of blocked.
Note: You can’t apply for the enhanced whitelist. AOL adds only a small percentage of senders who meet limits on volume — how many messages sent at one time to its servers — and spam complaints in a rolling 30 -day period. You could be on it one day and off it the next. Keep monitoring volume and complaints, though. How to Get on Individual Whitelists You probably have a line in your email message near the top, asking the recipient to add your sending address to his or her address book or contact/safe-sender list. But, that’s almost too late in the process. Also, putting the line at the top means readers who read only a portion of your message in the preview pane are not getting the information they need to decide whether to open your email to full size or even scroll through the preview pane.
Whitelisting with AOLMonday, November 26th, 2007 by rubypdfby Douglas Karr ![]() That sounds somewhat terrible, as though we were a spammer or something… but we aren’t. All of our emails are transactional or invitational in nature. In fact, no marketing emails come out of these addresses. I called good friend and deliverability guru, Greg Kraios, and he set me straight with the contact information for AOL’s postmasters as well as their website. I gave them a call and they let me know what steps I could take to get unblocked and onto a whitelist. I found our biggest problem was that our system was sending to erroneous AOL email accounts with our Reverse DNS lookup disabled. Reverse DNS is a means for an ISP to lookup your domain and company information by the IP address it’s coming from. By turning it off, we looked like a spammer. With enough bad addresses - AOL decided to take a look at who we were. When they couldn’t find out who we were, they blocked us. Makes sense! I can’t say I blame them. After we got Reverse DNS enabled, AOL dropped the block. I also spoke to our Sales team and told them to stop doing demos with AOL email addresses (they’re the easiest to type in, aren’t they?). After the block is dropped, you’re allowed to apply for whitelisting through the Postmaster site. I’ve applied at least a dozen times - but quickly found out that your ducks have to be in a row before you can make it:
I’m looking forward to the day we can push these emails out of our email service provider’s system so we don’t have to worry about it! I’m waiting for the official release of their transactional email system (that I helped to define!) as well as for some growth in our company. The sooner we can use their deliverability services, the better! AOL has some nice Postmaster services, but I’d rather we didn’t have to put up with the headache at all. One note, if you’re wondering whether or not I mind them blocking us or the trouble it’s taking to whitelist us… not at all. I love seeing a company vigilant about SPAM and looking after their customers. UPDATE: 9/11/2007: Received the following today. So we had enough mailer history to get blocked, but not enough to get whitelisted. Sigh.
UPDATE: 9/11/2007: I did manage to get our highest traffic IP address whitelisted! The previous denial was only applicable to our low volume IP Addresses:
Whitelisting with Yahoo!Monday, November 26th, 2007 by rubypdfby Douglas Karr ![]() Some recommendations before you apply:
If you’re sending out high volumes of emails, I’d highly recommend you get on the whitelist of Yahoo! and AOL. A whitelist does not guarantee that you make the inbox, the content can still get you in a spam filter. A whitelist won’t stop you from getting blocked, either, but it will give you a little more insurance that that won’t happen. The best defense from not getting blacklisted is to remove bounced email addresses from your list, always gain permission, and always send the email in a timely manner - corresponding with when you asked permission. I’m not a deliverability consultant - but I have a good friend who is and helps keep me straight on this stuff! |

