e-mail nondelivery issues

Help -- my nonprofit's e-mails aren't getting through to colleagues and other people who know us and have us in their e-mail address lists on msn, yahoo and other e-mail providers. Clearly we've been blacklisted somehow so I need to know what to do now. I'm a communications director; we don't have an IT manager and rely on a consultant when that's needed.

BTW, our e-mail is currently hosted by our webhost, a local provider who's very affordable & responsive but small. We have three active users of e-mail and a couple of addresses that are forwarded to other e-mail boxes.

You can search various blacklists to see if your email server is flagged [the link points to a site that checks 100+ blacklists]. Once you figure out what service (if any) has you flagged, check their website to see how to get unblocked.

You generally have to search using the mail servers' IP addresses. The easiest way to find these is to just ask your ISP (since they host your mail).

Alternately, you can run a mail server lookup for your domain name (everything after the @ in your email address). The mail servers will show up marked as "MX" and have a number (usually a multiple of 10) in front of them. If the mail (MX) record is another name (not an xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx number), then you'll have to look a little further down in the record to see what number matches with that name. (It's really not as hard as it sounds ;-))

Thanks -- now I have somewhere to start. I appreciate the links, too.

Hi

When your email is blacklisted it can be a pain to get the blacklisting lifted but you have been given some pointers in that direction. However, your email will have been blacklisted for a reason. The commonest cause is folk running an open relay server that is then exploited by spammers. Unless you can fix whatever problem lead to your email being blacklisted in the first place you will simply be blacklisted again.

Pete Cheer

Very good points Pete.  Our org got blacklisted a year ago.  Ours was because a user's computer got infected with malware, and kept emailing spam worldwide.  I was able to trace the emails to the machine via our web filter.  It showed a bunch of traffic.  If you don't have the capability of a web filter, perhaps a product like  http://www.wireshark.org/ would help you analyze the protocols.