A couple of months ago, much anger was generated at the office when we did not receive emails from a company. It turned out that the company was on a blacklist. Recently, we asked that they change an address they’re sending notifications to. I am not receiving the emails, though they sent a screenshot showing they’ve changed the address from one individual to the email list I’m on. I suspect I am not receiving the emails because they are on the blacklist again.
If our email system was flagging it, emails would go to a junk folder for review where we could whitelist them. Their emails are not even making it to our spam filters.
Who fixes that? Does the sending company have to go somewhere to enter their IP address for whitelisting?
Yeah, sometimes you can work it out with the blacklisting group to get your IP off the list. Sometimes you can’t. Your organization should be able to see in their mail log why the sender was blocked, though. And identify the blacklist in question. If it’s not easy to get off the blacklist your organization might want to consider not using that list in their spam scoring.
But yes to get off a blacklist you have to do it from your own domain. You can’t do it on behalf of a third party.
It sounds like your mail server is using the blacklist to block emails from the sender. The blacklist may or may not be using criteria you would agree with to determine inclusion on their list. Whoever runs your email is responsible for not throwing away good emails.
Basically each email provider does things their own way, many use blacklists. But there are hundreds of blacklists and they all have different standards, and mistakes are made sometimes.
Spam is a huge problem but filtering also involves throwing out a lot of babies with the bathwater. An analogy is you are expecting an important visitor to your office. You company has security guards in the lobby, and they don’t allow any visitors who are on a blacklist. But the blacklist isn’t maintained by members of your company, and you don’t get a phone call when the visitors are ejected.
If you can identify the blacklist, then the registered owner of the IP address can reach out to the maintainer of the blacklist to determine why they are on it and what they can do to get removed.
Most anti-spam appliances / services give you an option to whitelist domains / IP addresses. That would take place on the receiving end and is usually done by whoever administers your email system.
In addition, because of newer antispam tech, mailing lists can create these kinds of issues. For example, if the sender is using SPF to define where mail from the domain should originate and that email then flows through a listserv system of some kind, SPF breaks because the receiver sees it originating from the listserv which is most likely not on the authorized list.
In any case, see if you can get the sender domain whitelisted with your IT email folks.
This thread reminds me of when I was working as one of the tech guys for a small school district. There was much anger generated by some of the school board members, because they weren’t receiving important emails concerning special meetings, agendas, etc. In trying to figure out what was going on, we noticed that all the board members who weren’t getting the emails used the same locally owned ISP. My boss called the owner/manager, and learned that they rejected all messages that had more than a ridiculously low number of recipients - 5 or more recipients and the message would be whisked away to cornfield as if it had never existed. And what’s more, the owner adamantly refused to change the policy or even make an exception for the local school district. He insisted that there was never a legitimate reason to send the same message to that many people.
Go to MXTOOLBOX.COM and check the domain against a few dozen blacklists.
assorted spam filter and firewall companies run blacklists. They tend to have honey-pot servers to catch crap spam, and also many have spam filter software that provides feedback. Let’s pik on Barracuda, who have been in the spam filter business since there was one. They get feedback of suspicious behaviour from every filter they sell and support, and generate a list that they push out to thier customers. one customer gets the Nigerian Prince’s email and pretty soon that address and that pattern/wording of email is blocked at every Barracuda.
A decent sized company should not be on a blacklist. If one of their computers is infected (it happens) and is pretending it is an email server and spewing out spam - the corporate firewall should block that . Port 25 (SMTP) should only be allowed for the mail server, and nowadays the email is probably in the Microsoft or Gmail cloud.
I did find one company - they had a web site on a commercial server. That server’s IP was flagged. because that was their website (and website address for dozens of other companies), and there was a way for the visitors to fill in a form and send email to the company itself, barracuda associated that IP with that company among others. So it was the weird thing that the company was blacklisted on only 3 of the 50 blacklists on MXTOOLBOX.COM.
you can usually apply to have your IP removed from the blacklist. But… if you haven’t fixed the problem, like your sender obviously hasn’t, then the automated flag system will soon pick up the bad behviour all over again and they will be relisted. Blacklists have a limited tolerance for repeat requests to de-list. Often the blacklist can tell you what activity caused the problem, and the onus is on the sender’s IT to fix the issue.