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Frank Talk about Whitelists and Blacklists
Is an Email Service Provider (ESP) trying to win your business by saying that their company's "whitelisted" status is the key to your email deliverability?
If so, we respectfully submit the following facts for your consideration:
Whitelists
- An ESP's presence on a whitelist is only one of many factors used to determine whether your emails will get to subscribers' inboxes. Whitelist status alone doesn't appear to carry any more "weight" with ISPs than other factors, including email content, HTML validation, sending volume, etc.
- Presence on a whitelist will do nothing to prevent subscribers from reporting your email as spam. Our research indicates that as few as one spam report out of 10,000 emails sent in a given hour can cause ISPs to begin blocking the sender's IP address.
- Highly touted delivery rates are always shifting. The same ESP, sending emails from the same IP address to the same ISP will likely not be able to consistently reproduce the same delivery rate two times in a row.
Blacklists
- Presence on a blacklist is often a temporary, shifting thing. Blocks can automatically disappear after time (usually only 16-24 hours), and some can even be removed by paying a small "donation."
- Every ESP's IP addresses are blacklisted at some point in time. In fact, to go longer than one month without being on one would be considered remarkable.
- It's possible to have an IP address blacklisted even if you've never sent an email from it.
- If you email to business email accounts, remember that most corporate IT departments rely on filters, not blacklists.
- An ESP's professed delivery rate may include emails that have been blocked. Since some ISP's accept emails from a blacklisted IP but send them to junk mail or an internal quarantine area, those messages would count as delivered, even though they may never be received.
What's the point?
The point is not that whitelists and blacklists don't matter. They do. The point is that focusing on an ESP's presence on one list or the other is not the best use of your valuable time and resources. Also, it should never be the primary reason you choose--or choose to stay with--an Email Service Provider.
As with life, few things are as simple as black and white. But when it comes to email deliverability, the most important concept is pretty simple: build a list of active, engaged subscribers, then give them relevant, personalized information that suits their needs. If your ESP can do those things well, your subscribers will be looking forward to your company's emails.
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