Whitelists Don't Take Care of Everything
June 2008
For many companies looking to do Email Marketing, they are often interested in whitelisting. Requirements when selecting an Email Service Provider (ESP) include the condition of being included on whitelists for all the major service providers, to ensure their messages are delivered successfully. There is significant importance and focus attributed to whitelisting making it a high priority in the selection process.
There are some advantages to whitelisting, but the real strength in deliverability doesn't start and stop there. For a better understanding of this point, some history behind whitelists would be useful as there was a time when whitelists were the be all and end all. The term whitelist surfaced at a time years ago when spam filtering was less intelligent. The buzz back then was all about "blacklists" and "whitelists", with blacklists carrying an inverse priority. Getting on a whitelist was helpful to the delivery success of an email campaign but getting on a blacklist could result in deliverability issues when sending any type of email from a company's domain. As a result avoiding blacklists at all costs became a new priority.
Being blacklisted meant that a particular domain was an originator of unwelcomed and bothersome content and therefore recognized as an unapproved source for content resulting in delivery blocking. Gaining a whitelist entry had the opposite effect, it was like VIP access - go right through, no questions asked.
However, nowadays although whitelisting is still included within the more sophisticated infrastructure of ISPs filtering process, it's no longer an all access pass for delivery. List entries are still provided some form of special treatment but can vary from one Internet Service Provider to the next. Not every ISP will maintain a whitelist but those that do, it can help identify ESP email domains or IP addresses as high volume senders, allowing bypass for delivery.
ESPs are high volume delivery agents, distributing to large lists of recipients on behalf of a sender. So it's important that they are recognized by ISPs as sources of high volume sends and whitelists help that. But ESPs must also focus on ensuring the list of recipients they are sending to are clean. Almost all ESPs maintain strict guidelines as to the quality of sender lists in an effort to ensure that its recipients actually want the message.
Permission based list generation is the number one priority for deliverability success. This point is emphasized by the fact that credible ESPs have a mandatory feature of including an "unsubscribe" link in every message that is sent through their system. This gives a recipient complete control over whether to continue to receive a message or not.
The starting point for deliverability success doesn't begin with a whitelist, it begins with an opt-in process. True deliverability isn't achieved when a message reaches an inbox but when a recipient opens it. Focused efforts on growing a permission based list will carry much more weight than getting on to a list of approved senders.
