Help! I’ve Been Blacklisted!
As much as marketers complain about Spamhaus, most experts believe the anti-spam e-mail blacklist maintainer has done far more good for the e-mail ecosystem than harm.
“Where Spamhaus has really done the most good is where they put a dent in the activity of and/or stopped and/or brought to justice some really bad people,” says Rick Buck, director of privacy and ISP relations for e-mail service provider eDialog. Indeed, Spamhaus’s director, Steve Linford, recently had to move from his boathouse in the U.K. because of the number of death and bomb threats he was receiving.
Spamhaus maintains — among other things — a list of IP addresses it has deemed are sources of spam that some ISPs check against to determine whether or not to block incoming e-mail. Getting a Spamhaus listing can result in serious delivery troubles.
Chris Thompson, a Spamhaus volunteer, advises marketers who find themselves blocked to figure out what caused the problem, be prepared to explain what has been done to fix it — you fired a customer or partner, or educated the customer or partner, for example — and then follow established channels of communication set up by the blacklister or ISP.
“In general, for any delivery problems, my advice to the sender is to take things step by step and try to go through whatever channels are established to deal with the problem,” he wrote in an e-mail exchange.
Remember, stay calm. “Screaming doesn’t help. Neither does threatening legal action,” wrote Thompson. “Saying they are ‘Can Spam compliant’ just means they have a working unsubscribe function, which we expect, but which is only rarely related to the listing.”
