Being place on a blacklist can be devastating to your business if it happens to you. You can take precautions against being accused of spam, but it doesn’t always work; you can still be accused of spamming. This may be an unfair accusation as you have followed all the rules, but still have someone complain. This may happen because a second user of a shared computer may see your email and believe that it was unsolicited. These types of complaints may be limited in number and it is less likely that you will be blacklisted because of these misunderstandings. It may be that you are currently on a blacklist, but you would like to begin an email marketing campaign. All hope is not lost. You can end up on the whitelist where your IP address and/or domain are considered safe and your emails will not be blocked.

If you are not sure whether or not your email or domain is blacklisted, you can check on this on several different websites. After you find out you are blacklisted, it would be a good idea to find out what the CAN-SPAM laws say you cannot do with email. This will make clear what you should unequivocally not be doing.

You may need to be whitelisted with AOL and Yahoo. Both these companies have rules for you to follow when sending email such as sending email only from your own IP address. Follow these rules and you will be whitelisted with not just AOL and Yahoo, but also with Netscape, MSN and Compuserve. Hotmail will be a little more difficult and costly. Hotmail requires an application fee, license fee and a bond fee. This will require nearly $4,000.00, but this is for the privilege of sending 500,000 emails per month. If you have a need to send out that many or more emails each month, it will be advantageous to you and your business to spend the money it requires to become whitelisted. Anyone with a more modest email list will not have to be concerned at this time with following these suggestions.

To begin the process of becoming whitelisted, you will need to sign up with the various entities that you would like to whitelist your domain and/or IP address. There may be applications to fill out and a process to weed through before you are approved. For a list of less than 100, you will not have to worry about any of these steps. When you grow to 150 names, you can begin with Yahoo and AOL and build up from there. Anyone with 500,000+ names will have to follow the suggestions in the Whitelist Report, a guide that will help you do everything you need to do to become whitelisted.

To help you manage your email list read List Management Secrets.