Unfortunately, all it takes to lose swathes of customers and destroy the reputation an ISP is for a single email spammer to get a block of your IP addresses blacklisted by a number of ESPs and RBLs. It is a nightmare scenario, yet it is one that could all too easily play out.
Customers using any of the blacklisted domains would have their outbound emails blocked and, if they cannot send emails, they will leave in their droves for another provider. Perhaps even worse than losing those valuable customers will be the comments they invariably post all over the Internet. Negative feedback can seriously damage a company’s reputation and it can take a long time for a damaged reputation to be restored.
There are steps that can be taken to at least temporarily fix the situation. The IP addresses affected could be swapped, and netblock could be used as a temporary fix. Unfortunately, recovering blacklisted IP addresses is a very slow process. During this time, other IP address blocks could be lost.
Managing risk is difficult. It is possible to set limits on the number of emails that can be sent by a particular domain. Alerts can be configured to identify a domain that is being used to send spam, and it may be caught in time to prevent blacklisting. IP netblocks can be changed should it not be possible to prevent a domain being blacklisted by ESPs and RBLs.
The process of undoing the damage caused by spammers is a nightmare as well. New domains must be warmed up, and efforts made to ensure they are operated within acceptable ESP limits. Otherwise they will just get blacklisted again and the process must restart.
Fortunately, there is a solution that can be adopted by MSPs and ISPs that can prevent blacklisting. Install the latest version of SpamTitan!
SpamTitan v6.3 includes outbound email filtering
SpamTitan will prevent spam emails from being delivered to inboxes; however, version 6.3 also includes a sophisticated and powerful outbound email filter that can be used to prevent spam emails from being sent from accounts. If a domain is hijacked and used to send spam emails, or is used by an individual within your organization, the emails will be blocked and the ESP will not be alerted.
SpamTitan v6.3 uses the same identifiers to clean and filter outbound email as it does for incoming spam. System administrators can set rate limits by email address, IP address range, or domain.
If an organization needs to send a high volume of emails, to avoid inadvertently causing problems with an ESP, a pool of IP addresses can be used to send email and these can be rotated. This allows risk to be effectively managed. Damage to the reputation of IP addresses and the business itself can be easily prevented.
Any MSP providing multiple client domains can implement SpamTitan v6.3 and ensure that emails are sent safely, while the risk of blacklisting is kept to a bare minimum. The Anti-Spam solution will also ensure that incoming emails are cleaned and spam is quarantined, while the Anti-phishing module will protect against malicious attachments.