Your website could be blacklisted without your knowledge

Hands up; everyone who has started a new website and found that every now and then emails, sent via the website, do not get to their destination, or end up in the recipient's spambox. Most people assume this is the natural state of affairs because something like 90% of all email is spam. Some emails are bound to get mistakenly blocked, right? This is true, but there could be a far more damaging reason and one you should check out as soon as possible if you haven't already...

Whenever a new website is launched, the hosting service must assign the domain name to an IP address so that when a user types the website URL into their browser, the Internet can locate it (using domain name servers) by resolving the IP address. This might sound like geeky tech stuff you don't want to worry about, but press on - it may save your business.

So, you have a website operating online and everything looks great - your emails might even be working fine. But let's think about this for a second. Did you ask your host for a specific IP address? No. So they assigned you one randomly right? Well, yes and no - they assigned you one they had available. So the next question is this:

There's two things that could hurt your website:

At this point, like I did when I first realized this, you could be breaking out into a cold sweat at the thought of your precious blog or business being viewed as a spamming (or worse) site by the Internet blacklists. Luckily it is easy to check whether or not your IP is on any lists. There are quite a few online tools that will do this for you. MXToolbox has one, but you can search for "check IP blacklist" in Google to find others.

If you find that you are on a number of blacklists, and it's not because you are in fact spamming people, then you need to take this matter up with your hosts as a matter of urgency. It's quite possible that important emails from your website are not getting to the people who need them.