Why is my email bouncing back from internet service providers?
With blacklisting on the rise from many ISP's and spam blocking groups, we thought we would share a couple of simple ways to prevent your domain from becoming blacklisted with ISP's such as AOL, Earthlink, Comcast and more.
First, the quickest way to get your domain and/or the server blacklisted is to create an email address on your domain and then forward it to your ISP email address. Many of us want to do this to prevent having to check more than one email and that is perfectly fine. The problem lies with the ISP's ability to tell where a spam message originates.
Let me explain further. When a spam email is delivered to your domain email address such as me@mydomain.com and then automatically forwarded onto your ISP email address so that you can check it, many times we will innocently label this emails as spam using the ISP's tools or spam filtering features. What happens from there is the ISP will label the last known server, in this case an Argon Hosting server, as the source of the spam. This happens because the ISP's filtering mechanism isn't smart enough to read the mail headers of the spam email to see where the email actually originated from and sees only the last know server stamp which, again, is the Argon Hosting server. Too many complaints and the ISP blacklists the particular Argon Hosting server for 24 hours or longer.
So, you can see that forwarding or redirecting mail to your ISP can be a dangerous task if not monitored closely. The way to monitor it would be to read all your mail headers as they come in before labeling them as spam. Good luck with that. Best to just not forward at all.
Second, and this one is simple, use plain text email. HTML formatted email is much more likely to be considered as spam than plain text. It might not be pretty, but it will save you some headaches down the road. Besides, do you really need to put a background image of leaves in your emails?
Thirdly, make sure you DO NOT use a dictionary word for your email password. This can be dangerous if someone gets ahold of your private emails which may contain personal information as well as it can also allow a spammer to bounce emails through your account to their target. If your domain gets labeled or identified as the source of spam, your account could be terminated. The best password is an alpha-numeric password, at least 8 characters in length and containing no dictionary style words.
I hope these tips help you run a clean domain as well as help us to keep your hosting environment out of the radar of the spammers and the aggressive ISP filters. As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us directly or create a support ticket with any questions you may have.
