Greylisting and How Sendigram Can Help
What is Greylisting?
Greylisting is meant to help reduce spam and protect against email attacks. It is basically a temporary rejection of emails that the recipient’s server does not recognize as safe. The email soft-bounces and the sender’s server later makes another attempt to send it. The message gets delivered to the recipient on the second attempt. Why? Because spammers usually don’t bother resending their emails. So, when the sender’s server makes a second attempt, it serves as proof that the email is actually legit.
Disadvantages of Greylisting
- Delayed email delivery: Protection from spam comes at a certain cost and sometimes this cost is time. While an email soft-bouncing due to greylisting is not irreversible, a resend attempt might happen, in some cases, only in a few hours. For time-critical emails that might pose a significant problem.
- False-positives: Greylisting is not a 100% perfect mechanism and sometimes it classifies legitimate emails as spam. Like in the first case, it leads to time loss and, in some cases, lost opportunities for the sender and/or the recipient.
- Order inversion: This happens when you send a sequence of emails and one of them soft-bounces due to greylisting, leading to a broken sequence logic on the recipient's side. For example, if in your two-email sequence an actual business offer arrives after the "About us" message, it might lead to confusion on the recipient's side and damaged reputation on the sender's side.
- Failure to retry properly: In some cases, the greylisting mechanism may keep on rejecting a message. It happens, for example, when the second attempt is made from a different IP address or the sender’s server fails to retry, which can occur on outdated or misconfigured servers. Then, your message may be lost or get stuck for good.
How to Deal with Greylisting
Dealing with greylisting can be a challenge for email senders, but by implementing some proactive measures, you can minimize its impact on your email delivery. Here’s how to effectively manage greylisting:
- Enable automatic retries: Make sure that your mail server is configured to automatically attempt resending emails that have been temporarily rejected due to greylisting. Many mail servers already have this feature enabled by default, nonetheless, verifying that it’s properly set up ensures that your emails have a second chance at delivery.
- Monitor delivery logs: If you keep track of your email delivery logs, you will have an easier time detecting any recurring greylisting issues. It will give you a better overall understanding of your email delivery patterns and help you make the necessary adjustments to retry intervals.
- Use a reputable email service provider: Being a reputable email service provider means having existing relationships with major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and being familiar with best practices for managing email deliverability. By sticking with such providers, you can minimize the chances of your emails being affected by greylisting.
- Maintain a clean email list: Regularly go through your email lists and remove any email addresses that are invalid or no longer active. A clean email list reduces the likelihood of your emails being flagged by greylisting algorithms.
How Sendigram Can Help
If you have an email list and you want to minimize or fully eliminate from it any email addresses that might be potentially subject to greylisting, it is a good idea to use an email verification service like Sendigram.
Sendigram also provides you with recommendations based on your email statuses, so that you can make changes accordingly. Even if an email was initially greylisted, this way you’ll know what to adjust to improve its standing.
Ready to improve your email deliverability and fix the issue of greylisted email addresses? Visit Sendigram's homepage to learn more about our email verification service and start verifying your email list today. With Sendigram, you can ensure that your emails are delivered to valid and active email addresses, improving your email marketing results and campaign success.
Make your email verification process more efficient and effective with Sendigram's email verification service.