November, 21st 2009

Have you ever heard of the term blacklisting? More specifically when it comes to email sending and receiving and it actually making it to its destination. When email first arrived on the scene and started being the preferred method of how corporations communicate, spam and blacklisting was not an issue. As the business world has come of age spam is now 90% of all emails transmitted and filtering legit email has become more and more of a challenge.

Along with those challenges comes the risk of a company being blacklisted. BL in short means a company can be adversely affected in the way it can send emails to clients and business associates. When a firm is blacklisted emails that they send may or may not be accepted by the receiving party because filtering they have in place will detect that your Domain is Blacklisted and deny the email from going through. In a lot of cases small companies and even large ones don’t realize when they are blacklisted and start having issues with email making it to the other side. This is where the fun begins. A lot of IT administrators who do not have firsthand experience with email hosting or administration may not understand the ramifications of blacklisting and start looking in places that won’t solve your issue.

How does BL occur? BL usually starts when an email server is open for relay or has a virus in a mailbox and is sending out massive amounts of spam and the IT staff dose not realize it. BL can also occur when a workstation is sending out spam as well and your entire location or IP address of your firewall is blacklisted.

How do you prevent or know when you are BL? Obviously the best way is to use best practice rules set by Microsoft for email hosting, as well as keeping your laptops and workstations virus and malware free. IT administrators can also use some DNS tools to monitor your Domain and be alerted when an issue has occurred. A good resource is http://www.dnsstuff.com DNS Stuff charges a fee but is small and is worth having your domain monitored so your business is not affected by blacklisting. You can also contact TBS for further information and ideas of how to keep your email functioning 24/7.

The TBS helpdesk can be reached at 800 719 8324

Thank you for reading

The TBS IT Team