A new service that prevents legitimate emails from being inadvertently sent to the spam bin has been unveiled by Irish firm IE Internet.
The free service identifies a customer’s IP address and checks it automatically against known spam blacklists to ensure the customer is not inadvertently blocked from sending email by being listed on one of the many blacklists.
“Being wrongly blacklisted is an unfortunate yet common occurrence,” said Phelim O’Connell, managing director of IE Internet.
Every computer is assigned a unique internet protocol (IP) address – a 9-digit number usually in the format of xx.xx.xx.xxx – which uniquely identifies it.
When sending email, the IP address is used to identify the computer and reconcile the email address.
To protect email users from spam email and viruses, whole ranges of IP addresses that are recognised by the industry as known spammers are ‘blacklisted’ or barred from email traffic.
Occasionally this can affect genuine email users if their IP address was inadvertently or maliciously compromised by a known spammer, which can result in loss of time, revenue, loss of business or reputation.
O’Connell said: “If you suspect that you have been blacklisted, you can now go to blacklist.ie, see if you are listed and contact the blacklist operator to get them to unlist you.”
By John Kennedy
