How to Delist from Blocklist.de

When you run an email test with GlockApps, oftentimes you may be frustrated by a warning that your sending IP address is blacklisted. Blacklists can work as a firewall on the path of your messages to the recipient’s mailbox so that your legitimate emails never reach the destination. At the same time, blacklists do a good job by blocking viruses, malware, phishing emails, and any kind of spam sent by known spam emitting sources. Blacklists are part of the email marketing life. It is important that you understand how they work and what to do to keep the IP address off a blacklist. This article explores Blocklist.de and essentially how to delist the IP from blocklist.de.

What is Blocklist.de?

Blocklist.de stands out among other blacklists by the fact that it doesn’t list the IP addresses based upon reported spam. That’s why the impact of a Blocklist.de listing on email deliverability is minimal. Legitimate email senders should never find their IP addresses listed on this blacklist. Blocklist.de is a free service that detects attacks on its servers via SSH-, Mail-Login-, FTP-, Webserver- and other services. Blocklist.de then reports attacks to the abuse departments of the infected hosts. To find the IP addresses of the hosts the attacks come from, Blocklist.de uses information from:

Whois (abuse-mailbox, abuse@, security@, email, remarks);
the RIPE Abuse Finder;
the contact database from Abusix.

However, errors happen and sometimes Blocklist.de may list an innocent IP address that is not involved in any form of computer fraud or attack. So to minimize the errors, Blocklist.de communicates with other platforms that maintain whitelists and blacklists of the IP addresses or domain names. Thus, Blocklist.de uses the whitelists from www.dnswl.org and www.spamhauswhitelist.org and the blacklist from torproject.org to reduce the listings of “clean” IP addresses.

How to Remove IP from Blocklist.de

If you were unfortunate by having your mail server compromised and listed on Blocklist.de, don’t be panic as the listing will automatically expire in 48 hours. However, if you detected and resolved the problem that had caused the listing, you can remove the IP address from Blocklist.de before its automatic expiration. To delist from Blocklist.de, go to the Delist page, enter the IP address and click “Delete”. Your IP will be removed within 60 minutes.

How to Avoid Being Blacklisted by Blocklist.de

As we said, Blocklist.de doesn’t deal with the IP addresses involved in sending spam. It is developed for detecting and blocking the IP addresses involved in computer fraud, server abuse, or attack. If you are a legitimate email sender, you are unlikely to ever see your IP address listed on Blocklist.de. However, to secure your mail server, do regular security checks of your server to make sure you don’t have a virus, or an open proxy, or a trojan sending spam, or some sort of unusual misconfiguration which can cause your IP address to be listed on Blocklist.de.