IMMania.com

In an effort to expand my list building experience, I created a new site based around the eBay affiliate program and the “Mini Money Site” (MMS) model taught by Dennis Becker at the Earn1kaDay membership site.

Everything went together very smoothly, especially now that I’ve gotten the hang of the MMS building process. The site building software that comes with membership in Earn1kaDay really makes the whole thing go quickly. So I loaded up the completed site to my hosting account and proceeded to open up a page in IE7. I use Firefox as my main browser, but I still use IE7 to view my sites and also for the Google Adsense Preview Tool.

Anyway, I have to admit that I was somewhat shocked to see the Phishing warning dialog box pop up after my page had finished loading. I opened several other pages on the site and lo and behold, got the same ominous warning!

Out of curiosity, I opened the help page from the phishing filter to see what the problem might be. The warning message was that my site “may” be a phishing site and that the visitor should seriously consider whether they want to give up their personal information. This personal information was listed as everything from email address to credit card and bank account info. Whoa! I know I had an opt-in form, but no where was I phishing for personal financial account info!

It seems that Microsoft flags any type of opt-in form as a signature for phishing. I also assumed that since I had just registered the domain the same day, that I wasn’t in Microsoft’s list of trusted sites. It did seem rather strange that this is the first time I had run across this, but I only have one other site that has an opt-in form and it’s been around now for 2 years.

At this point I was somewhat distressed because I was eager to start rolling out an Adwords campaign and the clicks for this particular niche are not cheap. Talk about flushing money down the toilet! I imagined visitors clicking through my Adwords ad onto my site using IE7 only to be greeted with “This site may be a phishing site!”.

How fast would they be hitting the back button?

My only recourse at this point, short of abandoning the new site, was to submit a request to MS via the phishing filter dialog box and request they review my site for possible inclusion in their list of trusted sites. The form asks for your personal info as well as a list of pages triggering the filter. Well, ALL of my pages were triggering the phishing filter, so rather than add them all in I just put the url for the index page and added a note that all pages were being flagged.

A very important point here is that they ask for the url to your privacy policy. So be sure this page exists and is adequate. It probably also helps to have a contact page and to make sure all of your links work before submitting your site to MS.

Well, to my pleasant surprise I received an email the next morning from MS stating that they had reviewed my site and would be adding it to their trusted list. They stated that it could take a few days for it to update completely. Another pleasant surprise was that by that evening, my site was no longer triggering the IE7 phishing filter for any of its pages.

The moral of this little story:

I’m really not sure. Was it just me? Was it a combination of a brand new domain combined with an opt-in form? The one thing I would take away from my experience, is to at the very least, always check your sites in both Firefox and IE7 and if you trigger the IE7 phishing filter, promptly submit a removal request to MS and hopefully you’ll also receive a prompt resolution.