How Blacklisted IPs Destroy A Business and its Clients
Just under 57% of global email traffic is spam, according to this 2017 Statista report. With a daily volume of 269 billion emails sent, it’s obvious that roughly 153 billion of those emails need to be stopped from being sent out. We think about spam as a mere annoyance, something that can mostly be left for someone else to deal with. However, spam is a lot more dangerous than that. If your email server’s IP is blacklisted, your entire business and your customers are at risk. So, what exactly is a blacklisted IP address and how will it affect your business?
What is a blacklisted email IP and how does it happen?
When a website’s email IP is blacklisted, all emails sent from that IP are blocked. To be clear, this is not the same as your email landing in the recipient’s Spam folder. When your email IP is blacklisted, you won’t be able to send out any email from that IP address until it is removed from each blacklist.
If you try to send email from a blacklisted IP, you will receive a notification that your email has bounced. There are a couple of ways to make this can happen:
- The email recipient reports your email as spam. This blacklists your email IP for that single recipient.
- If enough email recipients report your email as spam, your email IP will be blacklisted by one or more of the many blacklisting organizations.
Dozens of organizations blacklist spam email IPs. If your email IP is blacklisted, getting removed from all of the lists may require substantial time and resources.
Spam
Virtually everyone knows what spam is. What most businesses don’t realize are the real costs of spamming. When an email server is hacked and used to serve spam, multiple things happen in a short time:
- Your business is funding and hosting the spam being served, even if you’re not aware of it
- Your email IP is quickly blacklisted, without any warning
- Your domain reputation is harmed, lowering your SERP ranking
- Loss of business
- The expense and resources required to fix your email server and restore your business reputation
How email servers are compromised
Inadequate security measures are almost always the culprit when an email server is hacked. There are several ways in which this can happen, including:
- Phishing scams that persuade recipients to provide login credentials for your website’s hosting account
- Brute force attacks to gain login credentials to web hosting server and/or email server
- Unsecured email servers
- Weak username/password combinations that can be easily guessed
- Log-in attempts not set to a reasonable limit
- No time between maximum failed login attempts set
Our outbound SMTP service is the perfect way to handle blacklisted IP’s – we will accept your email, clean your messaes and help you get around ISP black lists.
Top 3 security measures that aren’t adequate by themselves
Most of us love simple, one-step-solves-all-problem solutions, but in IT, that’s rarely the case. Simple, convenient solutions often fail to address all key security issues, leaving multiple vulnerabilities open to exploitation by hackers.
- HTTPS/SSL/TLS: Encryption of your email is good practice, but you need more than just that to secure your email server. Even with HTTPS, hackers can gain access to your email server.
- Secure email admin login credentials: This should be a key part of any general IT security strategy. Secure logins go a long way in keeping your email secure, but they’re not enough by themselves. SMTP servers lack authentication and can be easily accessed by a hacker through an open port. According to this article from MalwareBytes, email spoofing is still a thing. Tools are readily available on the Internet to make it easy for a hacker to spoof your email server’s IP address and use it to send spam.
- Serve email from a dedicated server: Dedicated servers make your entire website much more secure than shared hosting, and should be a no-brainer for most businesses. However, a dedicated email server is not enough to prevent it from being hacked. Other measures also must be taken if you want to make your email server as secure as possible.
However, If none of these steps are adequate, what are your options?
How to properly secure your email server and protect your mail server IP
Before beginning work on improving the security of your email server and is IP address, you need to perform a security audit of your current email server and IP address. Identify all email security vulnerabilities and evaluate the security risk levels of each one. Use that information to create an email security strategy that includes the following:
- Prioritize vulnerabilities from most severe to least
- Use vulnerabilities as a guide to map out an update/upgrade strategy for:
- Mail server hardware
- Mail server software
- Mail server firewall setting
- Engage IT staff in continuous training that keeps up-to-date on the latest developments in mail server security and spam detection
- Ensure IT staff are maintaining the highest levels of security on mail servers
All of these efforts address important aspects of mail server security and, by extension, the preservation of the good reputation of your mail server IP. However, there is a caveat: the costs and resources of these efforts can quickly escalate your IT budget. What would you do if you were to learn that there is a simpler, much better solution available?
Our Outbound SMTP Service is the perfect way to handle blacklisted IP’s – we will accept your email, clean your messaes and help you get around ISP black lists.
Secure third-party outbound email hosting: a better solution
While cybersecurity is still one of the top 5 things that keep IT managers up at night (according to this Forbes article by Steve Andriole), many seem reluctant to hand off certain IT functions to cloud-based, third-party service providers. Secure outbound email hosting is one of those services. Perhaps they instinctively flinch every time another major data breach makes it into the news and figure that they are better off keeping their email on an aging legacy server, unable to trust even the most reputable of third-party SMTP hosting solutions. While trust issues based on mass-scale data breaches are understandable, IT managers may be setting themselves up for a blacklisting nightmare. The hacker saddles up a pale laptop and rides, unleashing hellhound bits to attack aged servers, turning them into spam servers from hell.
What third-party outbound email services are
Third-party email services provide secure, cloud-based email hosting for organizations. A highly skilled staff works on servers day and night to maintain fast, secure mail servers so you don’t have to. Email security experts stay up-to-date on the latest security threats and create strategies to mitigate security risks. The result: secure email services that IT managers like you can count on to protect your email servers and all of your email IP addresses.
Key benefits of a third-party email host:
- Free up IT hours to focus on other important tasks
- Highly skilled email and security experts to keep your email and its IP safe
- Protection of organization reputation among industry peers and clients
- Protection against email server attacks using smtp email service
- Protection against email IP spoofing with the help of smtp services
- Rigorous maintenance of email servers and software
- Latest server hardware and software to maintain the highest level of security possible
- Peace of mind knowing that your email server and IP are secure
With all of these benefits and more, a third-party SMTP email hosting solution seems like a no-brainer for virtually any business.
DuoCircle: your secure email management solution
Here at DuoCircle, we provide enterprise email management services for all of your email needs. Our outbound email services include secure servers in data centers all around the world, with spam filtering for your outbound email. Our secure email gateway allows you to manage your email server from the comfort of your own office or use a cloud-based solution. Duocircle quickly filters and cleans your email, sending it out to your mail server in less than 4 seconds.
Why a third-party email management provider like DuoCircle is important
DuoCircle has the staff and resources to provide you with top-rated email services that are fast and secure. They provide services that can be tailored to be compliant with your business governance and your security requirements. Our email management services also provide regulatory compliance that includes industry-specific requirements. You get best-in-class spam filtering at a fraction of the cost of other providers.
When you choose DuoCircle, you choose a leader in secure, compliant email management services.
Our Outbound SMTP Service is the perfect way to handle blacklisted IP’s – we will accept your email, clean your messaes and help you get around ISP black lists.