It’s one of the most frustrating hosting-related problems, especially for a small business. You go to send legitimate email, whether its personal, business or a legitimate mailing list, and find that much of it either bounces back as spam or is promptly placed in the recipient’s junk folder.

As both human beings and legitimate marketers, we expect our emails to make it to their destinations without any side trips through spam filters. However, for most of us, it is inevitable that least some of our mail will get caught up, undeserving casualties in the war on spam.

But while an occasional blocked message might be a sign of bad spam logic on the receivers end or a hyper-sensitive filter, regular and repeated problems could be a sign of something worse.

One of the worst possible scenarios is that your outgoing mail server may be placed on one of many dozens of public and proprietary spam blacklists. This can cause your mail, no matter how legitimate, to get bounced or junked before the receiver even has a chance to look at it.

But how does one get on such blacklists? The answer may lie with your host.

The Spam Problem

Many, if not most, large shared Web hosts don’t run mail servers on the same machines that run Web sites. Rather, they have centralized mail servers that handle email for all of the company’s customers, regardless of what server their sites are on.

This is not a bad thing in and of itself. This decreases the overhead on the Web servers, enabling them to have lower load and carry more customers, and email delivery should be faster and easier to monitor. It also prevents problems on one server from affecting the other so, if your email goes down, your site doesn’t go with it.

The problem though is that you’re sharing your email server with all of the other customers on the company, more or less. Though you already share your server with thousands of other “neighbors” (hence the name “shared” hosting) this expands the number to many times that size. So, where you might share a Web server with a few hundred or thousand people, you might share your email server with many tens of thousands.

This becomes a problem when spammers begin to use the host and their email server to send out spam. If the host isn’t able to block their efforts or stop it quickly enough, it can result in the servers IP address being blacklisted and that, in turn, will affect everyone sending mail from that server, in some cases the entire client base.

Since spammers can be notoriously tricky to stop and it can be weeks before such blacklists remove the server, customers may find their legitimate email being returned or junked for quite some time.

This can create headaches for all involved, especially business that depend on email as a means of communicating with their customers.

However, it is a problem that can be overcome with a little bit of help.

Fixing the Problem

For the companies that do spam filtering, the problem is pretty simple. The IP address you use to send out email is being used to send out spam. As such, they have decided to blacklist it, at least until the problem is corrected.

The only way to avoid being caught up in the blacklist is to send email from a different server, fortunately, there are at least a few ways to do that.

1. Change Hosts: This one should be obvious, but if you move to a different host, the problem should straighten out (so long as you aren’t the spammer). It might be a pain to move, but if your host isn’t doing enough to stop spam on its service, it is likely time to bail anyway.
2. Use Google Apps: With Google Apps you can offload your email to Google’s servers, which have a great reputation when it comes to not allowing spam and has never been blacklisted to my knowledge. Best of all, the free version will be good enough for most users and all it requires is a few simple changes to your site’s DNS.
3. Send Via a Different SMTP Server: If you can’t do either of those things, remember that your ISP probably offers a free SMTP server and you can use it.

Another, last ditch, effort might be to petition the blacklists to remove the server. However, this is really a job for your host and, even if the problem has been cleared up, it can be days or longer before the blacklist is lifted.

This is why it is so important for hosts to be aggressive in stopping spam before it becomes a problem, rather than merely responding to issues once they are raised.

Bottom Line

Having your legitimate mail be marked as spam is, at best, annoying and is, at worst, outright ruinous. Though some hosts have occasional problems along these lines, for others it seems to be almost perpetual. If you’re finding the latter to be the case, you’re probably in a “bad neighborhood” and it is time to get out.

Sure, there are solutions that will let you send email safely while keeping the same Web host, but a host that tolerates email spam will likely also tolerate Web spam and other unwanted neighbors that can impact your site in the search engines.

In short, once the spammers have taken roost and they aren’t being thrown out, it’s time to make your way to the exit.

(Thanks to kveselyte for the image)

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