| Maybe your domain isn’t on blocklists, but what about your IP? Assuming you don’t send spam, the question of whether or not your IP is on blocklists is primarily a function of both how long you’ve had your IP address, and how well-behaved its neighboring IPs are. For example I just tried checking[^1] the public IPv4 address of a VPS I’ve been managing for about a year. It’s never sent or received any email for at least as long as I’ve been using it, but it’s showing up on two blocklists![^2] Surprisingly, my home IP address (which is a dynamic IP, in a pool of other residential IPs) is only on two blocklists[^3] as well. I would have expected more, because in my experience IPs known to be residential are almost always blocklisted, just as a matter of fact! Of course this doesn’t check the main blocklists used by Microsoft and Gmail. I’d expect my home IP to be on those (because I’d expect the entire pool to be), but maybe my VPS might not be! Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that whether or not the battle has been “lost,” it’s definitely stacked against anyone who doesn’t start out with essentially a known-good, static IP address that you can control the reverse DNS record for. You could do absolutely everything else right, but if you can’t get ahold of an IP address from a reputable provider that isn’t known for spammers using their service, you’ll probably have a lot of trouble with delivery of outbound mail. And that’s not a battle that I want to fight right now… [^1]: https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check [^2]: spam.dnsbl.sorbs.net and dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net. [^3]: dnsbl.sorbs.net and dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net |