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

Yahoo using Sender Score Certified whitelist and Return Path was quietly made public in January 2008, “Yahoo! is implementing the scheme and will begin checking using it sometime in spring.” We have not heard much since. My connection at Return Path just mentioned Yahoo the other day and brought it back to mind.

Return Path blog says “Receivers that accept the Sender Score Certified whitelist include, among others, Windows Live Hotmail, Time Warner Cable, GoDaddy and soon Yahoo! and Yahoo! operated email properties.”

Maybe this is why Yahoo has been such a nightmare to deliver to lately and why Yahoo pulled it’s FBL in March.

Since they announced that Comcast would offer an FBL managed by Return Path I have been expecting the Yahoo Sender Score Certified Return Path full press release to come forth.

I don’t mean to be a nutty conspiracy theorist here, but first Comcast has no whitelist, no FBL and is tough to get your email delivered to. Then Comcast offers an FBL through Return Path. Next, it’s Yahoo, who pulls their FBL, calling it an end to a beta, is impossible to deliver any email to for months and now is poised to solve it all with Sender Score Certified and Return Path.

As always I invite your comments below! = Chris Lang