IP Blacklisted On A New Service (Hostwinds)

If you have ordered a new Hostwinds service and are receiving bounce-back messages about being on a blacklist and your service is within the first 30 days, please open a ticket to our Technical Support with the details below. This guide is intended for Hostwinds clients who have ordered a new service within the past 30 days.

This ticket will require the details below so that we may assist you:

• Email logs
• Email headers
• The email account you are sending from
• The email account you are sending to
• Any bounced back error messages
• A full explanation of cause and fixes for any Abuse (spam or otherwise) tickets on your account if Hostwinds Abuse Department has notified you

While we try very hard to remove all accounts from our services that send spam and unwanted email, sometimes IP addresses get blacklisted before we can intervene.

When ordering a new service from Hostwinds, your services receive a randomly assigned IP address from our available IP Address pool.

We do provision IPs from a general IP pool. However, we also ensure that our IPs, after being returned to us (through cancellation or termination of the previous owner, the IPs were assigned), review and submit removals where possible.

However, most blacklists require the IP Address to be in an active state to have them eligible for removal. Therefore, if the IP is not presently active or assigned to a service, the removals tend not to go through.

The vast majority of listings work on a time-based removal. Therefore, if they do not see the previous activity that caused the listing of the IP address for X amount of time, they will be removed automatically.

We provision our IPs in a two-step process, we clean where possible, and we rest the IPs for a minimum period of 10-14 days. Therefore, a previously assigned IP is not automatically re-added for use in the IP pool that services are provisioned through.

Hostwinds also has a Zero Tolerance SPAM Policy and takes the appropriate action if our Abuse Team receives any reports.

Also note, that not all blacklists are actively utilized by Email Service Providers (ESPs). There are hundreds, thousands of listing types and organizations. Non-profits run some, and some are simply single individuals.

Our support staff also cannot guarantee the removal of a listing, as it's 100% outside of our control, to enforce a listing agency/individual from removing an IP address when it is listed, we can request, and we can ensure that all the items that the listing agency require/expect to be done, are met to better the chances of having the IP delisted.

We are happy to assist you with this. However, before assisting, we will require the following details:

• Email logs
• Email headers
• The email account you are sending from
• The email account you are sending to
• Any bounced back error messages.