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What does it mean when an email is "blackholed"?
When dealing with email marketing, what does it mean when your emails get "blackholed"?
Best Answer
- Recommended by:
- Maria Marsala,
- Molly Estrada
Not sure I've heard of this one, perhaps you mean "blacklisted"?
As a guess, I would say that the "blackhole" means the email was never delivered to the recipient, and there was no bounce notification sent to the sender of the email.
Many ISPs will hold an email, and not deliver it -- they just delete it. They do this to prevent deliverability feedback from going to a spammer. When I say "not deliver it", I mean just that -- not moved to SPAM, but never posted to the mail box.
Spammers will often take bounce logs from a dictionary attack and will promptly remove emails that bounce; it's their attempt to send clean SPAM. However, the ISP might notice that there's a huge percentage of SPAM coming from the IP address, so they stop sending bounce notices and begin ignoring all email from the IP.
If you want to provide additional detail, it might help me help you decipher the situation.
Good Luck!
G.
Thanks George for all of your information. That was pretty much my best guess too. I saw the term referenced somewhere and decided to pose it to the experts here at Focus to see if I could get any better insight. Thanks again for your response!
- Recommended by:
- Lauren Harper
Mark Wechsler
People can even post something they think is correct and it could be incorrect. I'm sure that I'm not the first person on the web to have someone correct me.
But I'm reminded that anyone who flames another on the web is being rude.
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Related Activity
No Maria, an email blackhole is not a bounced email. Please check your facts before you answer questions or better yet don't answer questions you don't know the answer to. The term can actually refer to different anti-spam tactics, including:
1. A DNS based blackhole list;
2. A fake email account that is set up using Hotmail, Yahoo, etc or disposable email addresses and used when registering for something so that future email (often spam) is routed to that address;
3. A program, called Blackhole, that is used to route spam to separate folders so it can be checked by an IMAP client.