DNS Blacklist Monitoring: Protect Your Company’s Reputation

Did you know that around 306 billion emails have been sent globally every day in 2020 and about 45 percent of all emails received are spam.  Even more surprisingly, websites that are marked as spam on email portals lose 95 percent of their traffic.  Email servers tend to blacklist certain IDs as spam based on their content. And for companies marketing their business via emails, 36 percent of the total spam messages across the globe are attributed to advertising content. Being put on a DNS blacklist could result in a break of communication between the company and current or potential customers. Hence, this could cost a lot of business, due to the dwindling site traffic.

How are these email addresses from the sites blacklisted? This is where DNS Blacklist (DNSBL) comes into the picture. A domain name system-based blackhole list is essentially a mechanism to prevent fraud. It monitors IPs that could be sending out spam or fraud content. And if the mail server for the user is attached to the DNSBL database, then any emails coming from the list of blacklisted sites could be either flagged or rejected.  The email servers do not even allow other companies to be sending out emails from the same blacklisted server.

 

How does DNS Blacklist work?

The whole idea rests on creating a database of IP addresses that could be effectively harmful, malicious, or contain any unnecessary spam content. The process behind this is DNS filtering. It works by flagging emails as spam or by preventing certain websites from loading.  When a company sends out an email, it is first received by an ISP receiver. This ISP will check for the authenticity of the email. How does that work? It will validate the given email address against a set of ISPs marked as blacklisted on the DNS database.  If it goes to the spam filters, then the email is flagged accordingly for the users. In this case, the fate of that particular email rests upon the configuration settings of the email server or the anti-spam software.

 

Consequences of being added to DNS Blacklist

Being blacklisted can mean a loss of business and reputation for the company. It only goes to show the lack of trust that users have on the content in the emails. It increases the communication gap as well.

How do these blacklists affect the companies exactly?  For starters, the moment an IP address or an email ID is included in the blacklist, it is classified as poor. In effect, the emails get the least priority in users’ mailbox. More often than not, these messages would be directed to folders that contain content from unknown and unreliable senders, such as your spam folder, or get blocked completely.

The direct consequence of this is that users do not have immediate access to the communication sent out by the company. When it comes to advertising content, users do not get to see relevant information at all. Since email communication is one of the primary channels for e-commerce websites, this can prove to be a costly side effect to being blacklisted.

An IP block could lead to a huge financial loss. If current users and potential customers aren’t even receiving emails, they’re going to be less aware of a company’s updates and marketing and sales information. It’s quite difficult to sell your products and services if no one is even aware of them.

Not only does this prevent the site from growing, but it also tends to bring down the existing site traffic. This, in turn, could lead to a negative customer experience, which could be detrimental to the business.

 

Getting Delisted from the DNSBL

The moment a company realizes that they’ve been added to the DNS blacklist, immediate measures should be taken to get delisted and get back to business. First of all, there are online tools that could help the business understand if it has been blacklisted or not.

How does that work? This is a test that would prompt the user to insert a hostname or an IP address.  It performs a check against all the databases that could have blacklisted the IP. This can give the company a clear idea of the status of the mail servers. But even before that, the absence of customer replies or a reduction in website traffic could be a key indicator of being blacklisted.

Once the test is conducted, the next step requires the company to take the necessary actions to delist the IP address. This would include figuring out which sites have blacklisted the company IP and then contact them individually. Every blacklisting site has its own protocol and procedure to delist IP address from their blacklist. In most cases, they would provide a form to the blacklisted IP, requesting information for removing the address.

However, it’s essential to figure out the main cause that prompted the server to get blacklisted in the first place, and get it resolved before submitting the delisting application. This is where DNS Blacklist monitoring plays an important role. This continuous tracking process can help maintain the company’s reputation amongst the site visitors and other internet users.

 

What can Dotcom-Monitor do for DNSBL monitoring?

Checking on the blacklisting status and taking action to get delisted is quite a laborious task. This is where the Dotcom-Monitor platform can help. Through the platform, you can automate the process of checking blacklist databases and taking up necessary repair measures. DNS Blacklist databases are queried regularly with the IP address. If the IP matches, an alert is triggered.

It can greatly help companies in two major ways.

  • As soon as the IP is identified to be blacklisted, the platform sends an immediate alert to identify the root cause and resolve issues by communicating with DNSBL.
  • Sometimes, even if the IP address has been removed from the DNS database, the cache still contains the address. And emails from the server are still marked as spam. Dotcom-Monitor can track and identify such instances to safeguard the company’s public image.

 

Final words on DNS Blacklist Monitoring

DNS Blacklisting can cause a major drop in website traffic and consequently, revenue. Such situations need to be identified and resolved as soon as possible. The Dotcom-Monitor platform can help businesses stay clear of the blacklist and maintain their reputation amongst the visitors. Avoid a potential hassle and set up DNS blacklist monitoring today.

Try the entire Dotcom-Monitor platform for free.

 

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