How To Avoid Getting E-mail Blocked as Spam, and What to do if it Happens

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“The ISP doesn't know you mailed five different campaigns today,” Buck notes. “The ISP knows you mailed 1 million pieces today.”

Bottom line: To an ISP, aberrant e-mailing behavior is suspicious behavior. Avoid it.

“If you normally mail 500,000 pieces of mail a day, and tomorrow you mail 1.5 million, that's going to raise all kinds of flags,” says Buck.

He adds that failing to introduce new e-mail addresses slowly and safely into the house file is the No. 1 deliverability mistake mailers make.

According to Buck, when mailers add new e-mail addresses, it's important for them to keep hard-bounce rates — one cause of which is a mailer attempting to reach non-existent addresses — below 10%, and the spam-complaint rate below 0.5% throughout the process.

“So in reverse engineering that, the speed at which you introduce new names will differ for every mailer,” says Buck. An ISP blocking the mailer as a spammer will also result in hard bounces.

Unblock and tackle

What to do if you get blocked? First, you have to find out if you've been blocked by a particular inbox provider or if you've been blocked because you earned a listing from a blacklist maintainer such as Spamhaus.

Before contacting an ISP's abuse desk or a blacklist maintainer to try to get a block lifted, make sure you've identified the problem and have an explanation as to how you will remedy it.

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 — for example, you fired or educated an employee or partner at fault. 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 says.