If your small business uses shared hosting (like GoDaddy.com) to host your email you are at risk of being flagged as a SPAMMER! You might not spend time in the slammer but your email certainly might!
We’ve come to rely on email, and don’t give it a second thought when we hit the send button. We expect the email to get delivered, but sometimes it doesn’t.
Your Mail Server Has Been Blacklisted!
Have you ever received an embarrassing phone call from your best customer asking where is that proposal they need for the meeting today? Your email server may be blacklisted and your email is in SPAM Jail, worse you may not even know it!
Or, when your purchase order never reached your vendor and you can’t ship your customers’ order on time and you have to swallow overnight shipping?
According to M86 Security Labs, a global team of security experts, SPAM now accounts for 75.5 percent of the world’s email volume.
Internet Service Providers (ISP) and IT departments use technology to determine the sender reputation of each email sender. This allows them to redirect and hopefully sanitize malicious email so it never reaches end users.
There are (approx) 106 known blacklist databases that exist to help combat the SPAM problem. They provide a service ISPs and IT departments rely on to determine send reputation. Additionally, there are other services, organizations, and technology vendors that fight the SPAM and MALWARE war every day.
When an ISP encounters a threat they report the sender’s IP address to the blacklist databases providers who mark that IP address as a known spammer.
You May Be Guilty by Association!
When you use shared hosting you are share the same computer and IP address with hundreds or maybe even thousands of other computer users.
If your ‘neighbor’ sends and email that gets blacklisted you get blacklisted too! Your neighbor might not be a spammer but getting infected with a virus can have the same affect. For that matter, you could cause hurt your neighbor in the same way!
Seven Ways to Guard Your Legal Email From The SPAM Cops
You could host your own email server, which can be very expensive. If you are small, one-person business this may be cost prohibitive and you will still need to
- Use a free service like MXToolbox.com to monitor and alert you to any problems it detects.
- Always use best practices for email marketing. Never send spam or bulk emails, or collect emails using harvesting programs.
- Keep your computers and your network secure and up to date.
- Use anti-virus and malware software to protect your computers from hackers.
- If you have a local network get regular vulnerability scans.
- Never use a free service like Yahoo! or Hotmail. This makes your business look like a fly-by-night operation. Even when you’re small you want to portray the most professional and competent image possible with your own branded email address.
- Host you email with Google Apps.
For small operations on a tight budget you should try email hosting with Google Apps. There is free and paid version (which is very affordable) and is easy to setup. Plus you don’t have to move your webhosting; you just need to make some small adjustments on your shared hosting admin console.
Google apps also helps to control spam because of their advanced spam filtering technology they use for Gmail.com.
MX Toolbox – offers free monitoring as well as a variety of paid services to protect your email, your network and your reputation.
Google Apps email hosting walk through for Hostgator shared hosting
Google Apps email hosting setup for GoDaddy.com
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