Don't use blacklists!

Today we sent out a newsletter to all of our users.  It's a perfectly legitimate email sent to existing customers with clear unsubscribe instructions, and we completely honor all subscription/unsubscription requests.  We even process all bounce requests and remove emails that bounce 3 or more times.

Several hours later, SpamCop blacklisted us, and we got a slew of complaints from customers who weren't getting their order confirmations.  This is a perfect example of why blacklists are bad.  Do not use blacklists on your server!  If you use blacklists, you are likely blocking legitimate email because most of these blacklists make ill-informed decisions based on over-zealous user reports of spam.  There is no oversight and very little recourse for valid companies to contest the blacklisting.  For all we know, it could be one of our competitors reporting the spam.

All the user has to do is click the unsubscribe link, and we'll NEVER email them again, but yet they'd rather go through the trouble of filing a bogus spam report.  Go figure.