If you're tagged as a spammer, it's hard to get off the blacklist
About a year ago, Scott Madlener, a marketing executive, e-mailed a client several times but his messages were not getting through.
"It raised a red flag immediately," said Madlener, executive vice president for interactive strategies at the Performance Communications Group of Chicago. "We asked our system administrator to look at what was happening, and he came back to me with some bad news: We had been blacklisted."
Blacklisting is an annoyance for big companies, but one that a dedicated technology staff can eventually remedy. For many smaller businesses, having messages blocked or shuttled into a spam folder by an Internet service provider or e-mail administrator can mean lost revenue.