Well, This Is Awkward — Dealing With A Sudden Blacklisting

“This sucks. Blacklists suck. What is going on over at Barracuda? What did I do? This isn’t right!” – Senders and ESPs everywhere this past week.

Monday mood.

Listen, before everyone gets out their pitchforks and torches, let’s take a minute to breathe.

For one, it’s not just you. Senders across all sending sizes and industries are feeling the same pain right now. Secondly, it’s happening across all Email Service Providers (ESPs), so rest assured that your provider is safe.

On top of all that, this is even happening to good senders who otherwise have done almost everything right in terms of responsible sending. With all of that in consideration, we’re left wondering:

What gives?

Barracuda has given a great explanation of what happened on their twitter, and we feel for them. It’s a pain to have something routine get this much negative attention. Things got a little off the rails, but it’s started to cool off.

But by that same token, we can understand how frustrating it is to have your sending suddenly impacted. Our Deliverability services and support teams noticed the listings immediately and started reaching out to Barracuda on behalf of our senders. Once Monday rolled around everyone had caught wind that something wasn’t quite right.

Every support team this week

What can I do?

The best thing you can do is to request a delisting for your blocked IPs. We’ve already started seeing some IPs under Mailgun start to be delisted, so it’s worth a shot to either reach out to your ESP or Barracuda’s support.

Provide any details regarding your sending that might have initiated the block to help out the support team on the other end. How were the open rates of those emails over the past few days, any spam complaints, bounces, or anything of that nature? All of that information helps that support team out.

Keep in mind though, that you could be one of the few who were genuinely blocked over the weekend. If this is the case, you can still request a delisting, but you will also need to take a harder look at your sending habits to make sure you align with best practices. Otherwise, it will only end up happening again, and we all know how that goes.

Everyone is hurting

Remember: If we didn’t have email blacklists, there would be a whole lot more spam in our inboxes. And that, in our opinion, is way worse than a temporary listing.

Also, his is being felt across email service providers, countries, and sending size. Everyone is feeling the hurt this time around, and that goes for Barracuda as well. We feel for them, and we hope that the delistings are dealt with smoothly, efficiently, and with little more incident. In the meantime, just sit back and wait to hear on the status of your delisting.

It ain’t all bad.