The Difference between Domain Blacklist vs Domain Health

blacklistvsdomainhealth

Team Discovery works with two services with Domain in the name and that sometimes causes a bit of confusion – Domain Blacklists and Domain Health Lookup.

Domain Blacklists

A Domain Blacklist lookup takes a domain name as the argument and does the following:

  1. Looks up the A record for the domain to get the primary domain IP address
  2. Searches over 100 IP-based blacklists for this IP address and reports the results
  3. Searches a set of domain blacklists for the domain name and reports the results

This search will tell you what blacklists your web server is on and what domain blacklists your domain may have been added to, essentially giving you an idea of your domain’s public reputation.

IP Blacklists vs Domain Blacklist

IP blacklists contain the IP addresses of known spammers, malware infectors, virus and botnet distributors and other bad actors.  When an IP is on a blacklist it is has been caught in some bad act.  Since an IP address identifies a particular server somewhere, you know that the server is performing some bad act.

Domain blacklists contain a list of domain names that have been included in known spam attempts.  This does not mean that the domain is the source of the spam, or that the server is a source of spam.  It only means that the domain name or domain URL was included in spam or malware laden emails.

So, if you are sending email, you want to check the IP address of your mail server.  If you are running a web server, you want to check the IP address of the server.  If you are concerned about your domain’s reputation, you should check your domain against a domain blacklist.

Domain Health Lookup

A Domain Health Lookup takes your domain name and provides you with a battery of tests to judge the health of all aspects of your domain:

  • Blacklist status of Mail Server, Web Server and Domain
  • Status of your Mail Server and compliance with RFCs and best practice configuration (DMARC, DKIM, etc).
  • Status of your Web Server, including HTTPS Secure Certificate and setup compliance with RFCs
  • Status of your DNS and RFC compliance

So, a Domain Health test provides everything that a Domain Blacklist lookup provides plus a comprehensive look at the health of your domain.

Use Cases

For simply finding your Domain’s online reputation, we use a Domain Blacklist lookup.  To get an early warning on changes to your domain’s reputation, we use a Domain Blacklist Monitor.

To get comprehensive information on your domain, we use Domain Health.  To get comprehensive monitoring on your entire domain: web, email, dns and reputation, use a Domain Health Monitor.

In the worst case scenario, if your IP address or domain name is blacklisted recipients of your emails using anti-spamming/anti-virus  tools will reject your emails.

Talk to Team Discovery about the health of your domain health.

/by