SELLER ALERT Your Emails May Be Blocked Today

If you’re suddenly not receiving any emails this morning, it may be due to a problem with a spam filter service that is causing emails to bounce.

For online sellers, that’s a huge problem!

I was blissfully unaware of a problem until a colleague picked up the phone to tell me when she replied to my email this morning, it bounced. (I’m thankful she went old-school, phone calls are underrated.)

Our server-hosting company fixed the problem, telling David it was a DNS problem on Spam Cop, which the server uses to cut down on the amount of unwanted emails we receive.

Sure enough, the Spam Cop website is down, returning the following message: “An error occurred while processing your request.”

There are a few tweets referencing the problem when searching Twitter for Spam Cop, but a Google search netted nothing when I checked.

Ivan Sieder @ivansieder: For those in a similar situation: If you‘re using blacklist monitoring, chances are that you also use SpamCop. As they seem to have DNS or DNS-renewal issues, all of those checks result positive right now. (6:32 AM · Jan 31, 2021·Twitter for iPhone)

stacksmashing @ghidraninja: Finally a new excuse for not responding to emails in time: »Sorry, my spamcop was broken« (7:32 AM · Jan 31, 2021·Twitter for iPhone)

Check to make sure you’re receiving emails – use a different server. (David and I were receiving each other’s emails because it was server-to-server, but I wasn’t getting emails from Yahoo or Gmail.)

While it would be nice to take a break from all the unwanted emails, online sellers can’t afford to miss out on messages from buyers, marketplaces, and service providers.

Update: Response from Spam Cop:

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.