In a further effort to help legitimate businesses, here is how you can tell you have a Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or 8 blocking your site issue.

I am going to do a series of articles on exact terms that someone that was in my position with a anti virus false positive phishing entry so you can hopefully find this article and begin to clear your name.

This is about the only way you will be able to tell that an anti virus is blocking your site. The real problem occurs when your listing in the AV database spreads to other major networks.

Google Analytics Saved my Butt

You can tell that Internet Explorer is blocking your site if you have goal conversions set up in Google analytics. Check to see if you are selling any products to visitors using Internet Explorer 7.

If you have some type of block in a database it will be possibly consumed by the IE 7 anti phishing filter database and you will have almost 0 sales occurring in Internet Explorer. At the same time you will have a way higher sales success rate in Firefox.

That is the only thing that saved me was finding that FF had a 14% sales success rate and IE had a 0.26% rate.

This is not guessing on my part. This is the findings of the Trend Micro investigation.

Sudden drops in newsletter subscribe rates, abandoned payments, email click thru rates and sales in general are all indicative of this kind of blocking.

The only reason I got a few emails delivered was that I was highly whitelisted in Gmail due to my Google social network friends list.

Please tell anyone you know to look into this so that this does not happen to them. If I can help anyone do not hesitate to call me.

Still alive and kicking,
- Chris Lang

Being the most prolific email authority on email delivery (I have to be #2), Stefan Pollard of Email on Click Z is followed avidly by many, especially myself.

Marketing Sherpa went into very in depth detail in suggesting that we all use user email whitelist instructions on our sites. You can view Marketing Sherpa’a email whitelist instructions.

In fact this article goes into how Email Management is Lacking and not taking advantage of landing pages throughout the subscription process.

Now I asked Stefan to take a look at my whitelist email instructions and the whitelist email generator that built them.

Here is his response and mine is below it, so read on!

Thanks for the reply here Stefan but I do have to disagree with you on the point that our subscribers are more advanced than I believe.

The one thing I have learned is that you must construct your instructions for anything to include the lowest common denominator in any type of instructions. Look at the questions that come in from someone that tries to download a report to their own machine. Most Internet users cannot even download a file to their own file structure, manage to find it and open the PDF file afterwards. You have to provide explicit instructions on how to do this so you are not constantly having to answer support emails.

When it comes to email it can be even worse. Your email can easily end up in the spam folder until a new subscriber finds it there, opens it and then whitelists you to enable HTML and clickable links. I reported on this a year ago when Hotmail was the first to disable clickable links and HTML. AOL, Gmail and Yahoo have followed suit.

After reading your email Stefan, I decided to go back and add a line stating that “Due to the overzealous filtering by ISPs you may have to look in your spam folder and recover my email.”

Do you have any suggestions on how I could word this better? It should portray that it is not there because I am spammer, it is there because the ISPs filters get carried away. Also what other suggestions do you have for my readers that could help us get over the hump of a new subscriber trusting us and whitelisting our email addresses?

Also as far as FBLs go I totally agree! I have a complete list of 10 ISPs, their FBL links and how to use them, but I have to save something for the email delivery book!

Of course I invite all your comments below. – Chris Lang