Whitelisting your IP Address Can Increase Responses from your Email Opt-in Leads
If your IP address is placed on a whitelist, you can increase the possibility of responses from your email opt-in leads. Before we look at the benefits of being on a whitelist, it is important to understand the differences between a blacklist and a whitelist. Blacklists are lists of identified or alleged spammers that include their IP addresses and possibly their domain name. Whitelists, on the other hand, are lists of trusted, opt-in e-mailers. Internet Service Providers are struggling to handle the flood of spam that comprises approximately fifty percent of the e-mail messages they handle. If you are accused of spamming, you risk losing your IP address and email services. Whitelisting means that you have a list of sender email servers (Internet Service Providers) and/or email addresses that are never refused on first try.
When you use the whitelisting feature, you can significantly reduce the amount of mail your server has to deliver. With whitelisting enabled your mail server checks to see if an incoming e-mail contains legitimate recipients. Mail addressed to random names at your domain will be discarded, thereby cutting down on spam.
Typical tools employed by email users to control spam rely on content filtering to detect spam messages. The fundamental problem with content filtering is that it is a reactive approach for dealing with a dynamic threat. Traditional anti-spam filters compare inbound e-mails with spam content patterns or indicators that were derived from past spam attacks. Consequently, even the best anti-spam filters can catch only the most obvious and unoriginal spam but often miss creative new spam messages that do not fit any pre-existing pattern. The primary desire of Internet users is a continuously spam-free in-box. Content filtering is good but cannot guarantee a 100 percent spam-free in-box. The only method capable of that is whitelisting.
Whitelisting starts from a simple premise: that the only messages that should be delivered directly to a recipient’s in-box are from senders the recipient already trusts. Typically, a whitelist would consist of every email address in a user’s address book, contact list, and corporate directory. Most users also would want to include the sender addresses of every email they have moved to a folder and thereby accepted. Essentially, whitelisting is the approach on which instant-messaging services provide a largely spam-free experience. Although instant-messaging services refer to it as buddy lists or contact lists. Of course, Internet e-mail is more than a service for message exchange among acquaintances. It is also a medium for people we have never met to contact us. Depending on the sender, message, and circumstances, we might welcome messages from out of the blue. Whitelisting can work only if recipients have at least one mail drop box, separate from their in-box, where their other incoming mail can go. Whitelisting along with intelligent ranking of suspect mail in quarantine folders is the most appropriate and effective method for dealing with mail-content threats such as spam.
To succeed with whitelisting, you have to get out in front of your intended recipients, to make sure they put your sending address where it needs to go if they use address filters or challenge-response systems, before you send out your first mailing. You have to grab your readers when they sign up. In other words, post information on your Web sign-up form or in email notices so that they can get your sending address or domain name in the right place. A couple of steps to take to ensure your email goes through to your intended target lists are to be approved by major Internet Service Providers. Broadly speaking, this means you should stay out of junk folders when sending garden-variety email newsletters to their users. However, you can still end up in email purgatory if you send too many emails to the same Internet Service Provider at one time or if you send emails with the same subject line too close in time together. In addition, get new subscribers to whitelist you sending address before you send out confirmation notices or your first mailings to them. You may want to consider placing whitelisting directions right on your Web site sign-up forms, telling subscribers what addresses they must add to their contact lists or address books and, in some cases, even how to do it.
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