Why Blocklist is really the correct term

For decades, the industry has used the term “blacklist” to refer to IP addresses that have sent spam or domain names included in spammy email, but that’s not really what these lists are. Aside from other issues with the term “Blacklist” (ahem, thank you James Spader) it really is not the most appropriate. Let’s examine the real definitions for email:

Blocklist/Blacklist

A list of IP addresses or domains that should not be trusted because the IP address has sent email to a spam trap, sent email repeatedly marked as spam or may be misconfigured in such a way to encourage spam or other nefarious activity. Domains listed have been included in spam emails or are known to host malware.

Note: MxToolbox is not a blacklist/blocklist. We are not blocking your email, but curate a list of blocklists to provide information about who has listed your IP address or domain as problematic. In some cases, we can help you get delisted, but, in general, you’ll need to work with the blocklist to be removed. There are details on how to be delisted on the Problem Details page for each blocklist. As always, DO NOT PAY to be delisted.

Allow-list/Whitelist

A list of IP addresses that are highly trusted. This is usually used for VPNs, internal traffic, etc. where that IP address should always be allowed.

Note: When dealing with Blocklists, do not ask to be “Whitelisted” as you are not completely trusted. Ask to be “Delisted” and be prepared to prove that you have fixed the issue that caused your IP to be listed.

De-list/Greylist

If you are not 100% trusted, or not mistrusted by being blocklisted, then you are unlisted, or as some would say, “greylisted”. In reality, no company is going to go through the exercise of listing every single IP address that is not Blocklisted or Allowed, so those IP’s are simply unlisted, but still not 100% trusted. Typically, email from an unlisted IP goes through a multi-step process to determine if the email should be allowed in the inbox.

MxToolbox Aids Email Delivery

Focus on the basics of Email Delivery: Technologies like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and Best Practices in email list management and content relevance. Once your DMARC configuration is really set, then issues like blacklisting are actually more rare and less damaging to your email delivery. Get started today with MxToolbox Delivery Center to get to the Inbox.

Email Definitions: Bulk vs Transactional

In an effort to weed out spam and make email more relevant, Google and Yahoo! have recently made changes to their Bulk sender requirements that affect all legitimate email senders. But, what are the definitions of “Bulk” sender and “Bulk” email and how does that affect your email mix?

The Effect

Google and Yahoo! will now require bulk email from bulk senders to pass will SPF, DKIM, and DMARC compliance checks to be considered for delivery and provide a 1-Click Unsubscribe button. Failure to meet these requirements will result in short-term warnings, medium-term placement in Bulk or Junk folders and long-term email rejection. Normal business correspondence, Transactional Emails and senders who do not meet “Bulk Sender” status are exempt from the requirements.

What is Transactional Email?

A transactional email is any email sent with to a single user or account for a single purpose, typically in response to that user’s actions or interactions with the sender and typically with user or account specific content. Good examples of transactional emails are:

Account Creation Acknowledgements
Account Update Notifications
Login/2-factor Notifications
Password Changes
Order Acknowledgement
Invoices or Order Summaries
Shipment Notifications
Usage Summaries
Billing or Credit Card Issues (failure, update necessary, etc.)
Account Termination
Reminders

What is Bulk Email?

Bulk email is any email that is sent in large quantities or with marketing content. Examples of bulk email include:

Newsletters
Limited-time Offers
Sales/discounts Campaigns
Event Announcements
Vouchers, Coupons and Giveaways
Transactional Emails with any of the above content

That last one is the kicker. Any transactional email that contains marketing content could count as a bulk email. If you are layering your marketing content into transactional email, you should stop now.

What is a Bulk Sender?

The definition of a Bulk Sender requires sending bulk email but also varies across Inbox Providers. We’ll use the parameters that are the most conservative. The important thing to know: Once you’re labeled a bulk sender, you are forever a bulk sender. Therefore, it’s important to use email best practices when sending messages.

Email Volume

You could be classified as a bulk sender for sending any email to more than one person. While Google requires a single 24-hour period volume of at least 5000 emails to be classified as a Bulk Sender, Yahoo! has refused to define a volume limit. MxToolbox therefore recommends adhering to the bulk sender limits if you send any bulk/marketing email.

Emailing Domain

Email counts are by primary emailing domain. This means that all subdomains are included. So, emails from example.com, and email.example.com and marketing.example.com are all included in the message count.

Email Content

Email volume limits only look at Bulk Email. But that definition is based upon content. Again, most importantly, remove marketing content from transactional email to ensure that it is not classified as bulk.

How Can MxToolbox Help?

Tools like MxToolbox Delivery Center provide deep insight into your DMARC, SPF and DKIM configurations allowing you to meet basic requirements for Bulk Senders. In addition, our Inbox Placement feature will tell you if your campaigns are being sent to the Spam/Junk folders or actually making it to inboxes, as well as which Inbox Provider(s) you are having trouble sending to.

MxToolbox is the Expert on email delivery. We offer a wide range of email delivery services, including a fully managed email delivery service, so be proactive now and take advantage of them before these Bulk Sender guidelines affect your email.

Think that you’re on Google’s Blacklist?

Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that…

Blacklists have been losing relevance

Blacklists have been a first line of defense against malicious emails since the dawn of the Internet. Every marketer knows that if their sending IP addresses are on a blacklist, their messages are going to be denied. Most email marketers long ago moved to 3rd party senders with large blocks of IP addresses to limit the risk. If legitimate senders can easily change IP addresses, so will spammers, somewhat limiting the long-term value of an IP-based blacklist. Google, Yahoo! and other Inbox Providers know this and have been developing alternative technologies for years.

Blacklists are only the first layer of protection

Blacklists are still relevant for blocking large networks of bad actors and increasing the difficulty of sending spam, however, Inbox Providers like Google and Yahoo! have long taken a layered approach to Inbox Placement. Rather than relying on a simple binary approach with a Blacklist, Inbox Providers use:

TLS Encryption for connection
Blacklists (both internal and external)
DMARC Compliance (SPF Authentication, SPF Alignment, DKIM Alignment)
Spam Content Scoring Rules
Bulk Sender Spam Reporting Rules
Individual Spam/Junk Rules

If you are a legitimate sender of emails, more than likely, you are not on Google’s Blacklist. More likely, your email is being filtered by these other layers of their inbox protection.

Google is making changes to Bulk Sender Rules

Both Google and Yahoo! have announced changes to their Bulk Sender policies for 2024. Bulk Senders are any senders with more than 5000 emails per day. These senders will now be required to:

Maintain SPF, DKIM and DMARC Compliance
Have a 1-Click unsubscribe link on every email
Maintain a rate of messages marked as Spam less than 0.3% (or 1 in 333 message marked as spam

While Google and Yahoo! represent a large portion of hosted Inboxes, other Inbox Providers will keeping a close eye on these changes. Expect similar conditions for accessing Office365/Outlook.com and other major Inbox Providers in the near future. In addition, we expect that Google and Yahoo! may revisit and strengthen the volume and spam rate requirements.

How Can MxToolbox Help?

To maintain access to the Google Inbox, you need tools like MxToolbox Delivery Center. Our suite of email delivery tools helps your sending domain achieve the best possible email delivery rates, including issues with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. More importantly, our Inbox Placement feature will tell you if your campaigns are being sent to the Spam/Junk folders or actually making it to inboxes, as well as which Inbox Provider(s) you are having trouble sending to.

Time is Running Short to Get DMARC

Next month, Google and Yahoo! will make major changes to their email filtering algorithms in order to improve the quality of the emails delivered to their inboxes and reduce the threat of spam and phishing attempts. If you are a legitimate email marketer, time is short to get your email systems properly configured or you will have your messages blocked.

Google and Yahoo will Require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

In February 2024 for Google and later in the year for Yahoo! bulk emailers (>5000 emails per month) will be required to be SPF, DKIM, and DMARC compliant to be considered for delivery. Failure will mean being marked as spam/bulk or potentially undelivered entirely. In addition, marketers must keep spam rates below 0.3% and provide the ability to unsubscribe with a single click if the recipient chooses.

What does this mean for your business?

Google’s and Yahoo! are considered industry leaders in email filtering technology and represent a huge chunk of consumer inboxes. With the two largest email providers taking major steps to secure email, more Inbox Providers will adopt similar DMARC policies in the future.

If your company has already enabled SPF, DKIM and DMARC, your messages will be prioritized over poorly configured emails or spam messages. If you have not configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC, you have a short window to prepare. Regardless of your SPF, DKIM and DMARC configuration, however, the requirement to maintain a low rate of being marked as “spam” could really hurt you if you are purchasing email lists.

How Can MxToolbox Help?

Master DMARC setup with MxToolbox Delivery Center. Our suite of email delivery tools helps your sending domain achieve the best possible email delivery rates, including issues with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. More importantly, our Inbox Placement feature will tell you if your campaigns are being sent to the Spam/Junk folders or actually making it to inboxes, as well as which Inbox Provider(s) you are having trouble sending to.

Alert! Alert! We have new (Alert) Notifications

With email configuration settings becoming more critical to email delivery and Inbox Providers regularly updating email delivery policies, emergent changes to delivery patterns can have a significant impact on your business. MxToolbox has always provided a Weekly Summary of your email delivery, now we’re expanding our Alerts and Notifications with highly granular controls. If you’ve ever felt like you might miss a status or account alert, or you were tired of getting extraneous notifications, you’ll love our new Notifications system.

MxToolbox Centralized Notifications

Your current settings, subscribed users, and history of all notifications sent regarding your MxToolbox account are all consolidated in a single dashboard view. You can manage Notifications by User or by Type, and view Notifications History for the entire account. You can quickly turn on/off different email notifications and monitor who receives them.

Recently, we introduced two types of Data-Driven alerts, but as we add more notifications you’ll be able to:

Setup specific notifications for individual members of your tech team based on their specialties.
Limit billing notifications to you billing contacts.
Remove unnecessary notifications, alerts or reports from disinterested users.

Using MxToolbox Notifications

To begin selecting which notifications you would like to receive in your inbox, simply click the “Notifications” header toward the bottom of your Delivery Center interface:

At the top of this page, there are three Notifications categories:

Each category is editable and allows you to participate in different aspects of MxToolbox Notifications.

Notifications by User

The Notifications by User option lets you choose which parts of the MxToolbox experience you want selected users/team members to receive scheduled alerts for. You can use the none option to decline alerts by category, or you can select the all button if you prefer to receive every available notification via email.

The Delivery Center, Account, Summaries, and Other sections are also editable, so you can pick and choose specific notifications that users will receive alerts for in the future. Be sure to click on the helpful info and link icons (shown below) in each category for more insight.

Note: Some notifications cannot be disabled because they are required for supporting your account.

Notifications by Type

This Notifications section organizes them by type. You can easily set up multiple team members to receive specific emails or view who is currently allowed to receive them. Plus, you can quickly subscribe/unsubscribe certain teammates to various alerts.

On the left side of the interface, each tab (Delivery Center, Account, Summaries, and Other) lists the corresponding categories of those four headers.

For example, the Summaries category shows the Delivery Center and Monitoring types. Under each, their specific notifications are shown.

Assigned Users

On the right side of the page, the Assigned Users for every notification are provided. If you want to see or change who receives the various types of notification, simply select a specific alert and update the user’s access by clicking their corresponding button in the Assigned Users section. Green means that teammate will receive any notifications assigned to them.

Notifications History

The Notifications History page provides a log of all notifications sent to your chosen users, as well as any setting changes that affect notifications. For example, if you want to confirm that an MxToolbox Blacklist Summary report or a Monitoring Alert email was sent to a team member selected to receive those notifications, this interface provides that information. All updates and changes made are conveniently shown here.

Using the shown drop-down menus (Type, Domain, By, For, and Result), you can adjust the data view. These options essentially work as filters.

The table lists different characteristics of every notification for review, including: Date, Topic, Type, Domain, By, For, and Result. They are sortable to give you the desired insight.

Questions?

If you need help setting up any MxToolbox Notifications, our expert Support Team is ready to get you and your colleagues situated. The “Help” tab for each category is also a great reference to utilize. Stay informed and start receiving important MxToolbox alerts and communications in your inboxes today!

Inbox Placement – A New View from MxToolbox

Reaching inboxes has always been essential for your business. If your latest newsletter or campaign lands in the Spam/Junk folder or is never delivered, your email efforts have failed, not to mention the wasted time/resources.

Many of our customers do not realize that they have an email delivery issue until a customer or vendor reports a missing email. There are many subtle reasons why an email can fail to reach the inbox. Getting to the Inbox now requires active management.

A Wider View

MxToolbox’s Inbox Placement is analysis tool for your campaigns. You email our list of test accounts to see where your outgoing messages will most likely go before you launch your campaigns, whether it fails entirely, makes the Inbox or gets turfed to a Spam/Junk folder. And, if an email falls short of reaching an Inbox Provider (Google, Microsoft, etc.), our service provides insight to help you make necessary changes to improve your results.

Expanded Insights

Our team of Email Delivery Experts have been analyzing the most common reason why emails fail to make the Inbox and developing new ways to surface this information to our customers. The new version of our Inbox Placement tool has some great improvements:

New Overview Page: Better summary information of campaigns and inbox placement analytics.
New MxTips with MxScore: More analysis tools to help you make the Inbox along with our weighting of importance to help you prioritize changes.
MxTips Types: Better insight into which MxTips were tested and their outcomes (Failed, Warning, Success). They include best practices, content, security, and reputation.
Email Render: See a copy of the original email for quick analysis and (coming soon) in-render highlighting of the MxTip warnings.

How Does Inbox Placement Work?

With MxToolbox’s Inbox Placement, you get ahead of many unknown email delivery issues and stay out of the dreaded Spam/Junk folder. MxToolbox Inbox Placement gives you two options to test the placement of your emails:

Proactively send emails to our test inboxes – Whether you are crafting a new nurturing campaign or setting up a newsletter, send a test email copying our list of test inboxes. MxToolbox will tell you how the email performs!
Monitor on-going newsletter performance – Subscribe our list of test inboxes to your newsletter lists to continually monitor performance and get warned when your reputation changes with Inbox Providers. Inbox Providers are constantly changing their algorithms to remove irrelevant email. Each time you send an email to these lists, you get insight into how they performed with the major Inbox Providers!

MxToolbox Inbox Placement provides actionable information about your email campaigns, highlights any inbox deliverability issues outlines steps for enhancing your email performance.

How Can I Get Inbox Placement?

MxToolbox Inbox Placement is a feature of MxToolbox Delivery Center. Simply purchase one of our Delivery Center plans and you gain access to Inbox Placement along with our full suite of DMARC email delivery tools.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) Fraud on the Rise

Cybercriminals are a major threat to business email. Through various business email compromise (BEC) scams, these fraudsters can cause irreparable financial and reputational damage to your company. With BEC on the rise, protecting your inbound (and outbound) messages is vital to your company’s success and longevity of its brand.

What Is Business Email Compromise (BEC)?

BEC attacks are financial in nature and target organizations of all sizes. The gist of a BEC scam is a fraudster pretends to be someone at the executive level, then convinces an unsuspecting employee to help them wire funds outside of the company. BEC compromises often use publicly available information, phone calls and emails from domains that are similar in nature to the target company. For example: targeting MxToolbox.com with an email from MxTooŀbox.com. Look closely.

Loss numbers are frequently significant, and it’s a very appealing tactic for scammers looking to get rich quick.

Unreported BEC (Needed?)

Many instances of BEC fraud go unreported because few companies want to admit that they fell victim to a scam. As a result, cases are typically hidden until court proceedings. It’s difficult to gauge how much money is actually lost to BEC scams per year, but the estimates are astronomical.

Common Types of BEC Attacks

According to the FBI, there are five common types of BEC scams:

Email Account Compromise

In an email account compromise attack, an employee’s email account is hacked and used to request payments from vendors. The money is then sent to attacker-controlled bank accounts.

Vendor Email Compromise

Companies with foreign suppliers are common targets of vendor email compromise. Attackers pose as suppliers, request payment for a fake invoice, then transfer the money to a fraudulent account.

CEO Fraud

Scammers impersonate the CEO or executive of a company. As the CEO, they request that an employee within the accounting or finance department transfer funds to an attacker-controlled account.

Lawyer Impersonation

Fraudsters pose as a lawyer or legal representative, often via email. The common targets of these attacks are lower-level employees who might not have the knowledge or experience to question the validity of an urgent legal request.

Data Theft

Data theft attacks typically target HR personnel to obtain personal information about a company’s CEO or other high-ranking executives through emails. The attackers can then use the received data in other future attacks, such as CEO fraud.

Tips to Avoid BEC Scams

Because email is such a critical aspect of your business, a single compromised account is all it takes to financially damage your company and its brand. Here are some tips on how to stay protected and secure:

Carefully scrutinize all emails. Be wary of irregular emails that are sent from C-suite executives, as they are used to trick employees into acting with urgency. Review emails that request transfer of funds to determine if the requests are irregular.
Educate and train staff. While employees are a company’s biggest asset, they’re also usually its weakest link when it comes to security. Commit to training them according to the company’s best practices. Remind all that adhering to company policies is one thing, but developing good security habits is another.
Confirm any changes in vendor payment location by using a secondary sign-off by company personnel.
Stay updated on your customers’ habits, including the details and reasons behind payments.
Verify requests for transfer of funds when using phone verification as part of two-factor authentication.
If you suspect that you’ve been targeted by a BEC email, immediately report the incident to law enforcement or file a complaint.

How Can MxToolbox Help? (DMARC)

DMARC helps secure your company’s email platform and fights to protect against BEC scams. By implementing DMARC checks on inbound email and educating employees, the prevalence of online fraudsters and their BEC cons can be minimized. In addition, Implementing DMARC on outbound email will reduce of your brand being used in a BEC scam, potentially damaging your business reputation.

At MxToolbox, our email experts have created several tools and services to safeguard your business and increase its email deliverability. Check out our various products to help protect your company’s email reputation.

Our Commitment to Free Tools

MxToolbox started out as a simple set of free tools for IT and Email administrators. Most of our customers used our original DNS, MX and Blacklist lookups to verify their website and email setup and understand why email wasn’t going through. Since those days, we’ve committed to continually adding useful free tools to help IT and Email professionals with their daily tasks. From A record (and AAAA record) lookups to Whois Lookup, we have you covered (and if there is a tool we’re missing, we encourage you to let us know).

Not only do we have a comprehensive list of tools, we continue to expand it: when we find a tool we need, we add it to the list. For example, we recently added the:

MTA-STS Lookup: This test checks a domain or hostname for an MTA-Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) DNS TXT record and also for a valid MTA-STS policy.

Organize your MxToolbox Tools

We understand that not all our tools are for everyone, and that you use different groups of tools for different tasks: email, security, setup, etc. For your convenience, we organized our tools into categories:

All Tools: Every available free tool is housed under this tab.
Email: For email problems, this tab is your best bet
Network: To address potential network issues, try these tools.
Website: If you have any website queries, this tab provides answers.
DNS: You can find all tools related to DNS here.
New: This tab shows the most recent additions to our expanding toolbox.
My Favorite Tools: Your customized favorites list. For more information, see the corresponding section below. Learn how to setup your favorites

For a complete list of our free tools, click here. We always enjoy questions/feedback, so let us know about your MxToolbox tools experience. Be sure to use our tools to improve your email delivery rates!

Google and Yahoo are upping their game in 2024!

In the on-going battle against spam, Google and Yahoo have announced new standards for 2024 that will help protect their inboxes and curtail spam intrusions. This is great news for legitimate email senders who abide by email best practices as we expect other Inbox Providers and email services to follow their lead. However, your business may need to adapt to these new standards or risk missing the Inbox.

Google and Yahoo to Require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

For Google, if your business sends more than 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses, you must adopt SPF, DKIM, and DMARC by February 2024. Yahoo will apply the same trio of requirements to “bulk senders” in the first quarter of 2024, though they have not defined what constitutes a bulk sender.

The new email requirements include both SPF and DKIM records for authenticating email-sending domains, a DMARC record for the domain, and a “From” header that matches either the SPF or DMARC record, known as “alignment.” In addition, marketers must keep spam rates below 0.3% and provide the ability to unsubscribe with a single click if the recipient chooses.

What does this mean for your business?

Google’s and Yahoo’s requirements are a critical move to reinforce your company’s email best practices. With the two largest email providers taking major steps to secure inboxes, more Inbox Providers will adopt similar DMARC policies in the future. Getting prepared will be key.

If your company has already enabled SPF, DKIM and DMARC, you get a boost. Your messages will have to compete with fewer poorly configured emails or spam messages. Your email has protection against impersonation through better authentication and, with DMARC, you are able to see SPF and DKIM configuration issues that would put your email delivery at risk and detect spammers attempting to use your domain for fraud of phishing. If you have not configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC, you have a short window to get prepared. Regardless of your SPF, DKIM and DMARC configuration, however, the requirement to maintain a low rate of being marked as “spam” could really hurt you if you are purchasing email lists.

How Can MxToolbox Help?

With these upcoming changes to Google and Yahoo, now is the perfect time to use our various tools and products to improve your email deliverability!

Since DMARC will soon be a requirement for those providers, MxToolbox Delivery Center will help your sending domain achieve the best possible email delivery rates, including managing your DMARC setup. In addition, our Inbox Placement feature will tell you if your campaigns are being sent to the Spam/Junk folders or actually making it to inboxes, as well as which Inbox Provider(s) you are having trouble sending to.

MxToolbox is the Expert on email delivery. We offer a wide range of free and subscribed options, so be proactive now and take advantage of them before these new 2024 guidelines are applied to your outgoing newsletters and marketing campaigns.

Seriously, Stop Buying Email Lists

In the early days of the Internet, purchasing a list of email addresses was a legitimate business tactic. Lists were a new thing, sending an email was basically free, email servers accepted almost all email and spam was not much of a problem.

Spam – Unsolicited email that is sent in bulk.

Let me say this unequivocally, if you purchase and use email lists, You Are A Spammer. Any email sent in bulk that was not opted into by the recipient is considered spam. If you have zero prior contact with this email address, you are spamming it. It does not matter if you have a legitimate business and that you are not trying to scam the recipient, your email is still unwanted. Think of email spam as equivalent to the pile of unwanted ads in your regular mailbox. You didn’t ask for it and it wastes your time and resources to get rid of it.

Inbox Providers Have Ramped Up Spam Defenses

The main goal for Inbox Providers is to protect their users by eliminating irrelevant, unwanted and dangerous emails. Over the last 20 years, Inbox Providers have applied multiple layers of defenses around their inboxes:

Checking senders against Blacklists/Blocklists
Refusing non-TLS encrypted email
Checking SPF, DKIM and DMARC configurations and then bouncing non-compliant email
Scanning email attachments for malware
Scanning email links for potential malware websites
Checking content for known spammy verbiage
Deprioritizing email campaigns sent to closed, unused, or non-existent accounts
Aggregating sentiment across recipients

Now, using Aggregate Sentiment algorithms and AI, Inbox Providers can detect campaigns that have low relevance, start from purchased lists, or are likely to be marked as spam and drop the entire campaign in the spam folder. Further, some senders dependent on purchased email lists have reported all email from their domain being binned – essentially burning out their sending domain.

What can you do?

The first thing you need to do it stop depending on purchased email lists for prospecting, continuing to do so could burn out your domain reputation. To do this, you need to look at other methods for lead generation:

Online advertising
Word of mouth
Social media advertising
Opt-in email newsletters

How can MxToolbox help?

If you have burned out your sending domain, MxToolbox can help you setup a new email sending domain, configure email best practices, etc. however, you must change your email practices or this will happen again. DMARC, and a DMARC management tool like MxToolbox Delivery Center will help your sending domain achieve the best possible email delivery. In addition, our Inbox Placement feature will tell you if your campaigns are being dumped into the spam folder or making it to the Inbox and analyze your email for potential inbox placement issues.