Looking for new email service

[jlockley]

We use Godaddy. We recently found that some of our mail was not showing. We seem to have found a work around for that, but it is becoming apparent that a good deal of things sent to us are not reaching us, although there is no bounce back to the sender, and about 3/4 of the valid messages are sent to spam, although spam control is set at low.

Any suggestions of services to scope out would be appreciated. We are essentially satisfied with Godaddy as a domain service.

 

[smah]

So this 'missing mail' is simply being silently discarded? And a lot of good mail ends up in a spam folder? And there's no other spam filter system involved?

I have only used GoDaddy's domain name registration service, but it seems unlikely that their spam filter would be so much more strict than all the other systems in the world. However, if this is the case, the only thing that I can think of is to turn off their filtering capability completely and rely on a third party system - either an outsourced service like mxlogic or an in-house perimiter appliance like a barracuda device.

 

[jlockley]

Looks like it. An increasing number of clients have reported bounces. For about a week or two, we have been asking clients to send via a forwarded Gmail address. (ourdomainname@gmail.com -> us@ourdomainname.com) I think that bounces may be getting caught in the filters of larger networks and not reaching the senders, but we had two issues today which show that the current system is costing us clients.

I am not sure it is possible to turn off their filters entirely. I don't know if the unsuccessful mail is getting caught in server based rbl filters or what. It's been this way for about a week and tech support is not exactly receptive, so right now I am looking for possible alternate mail hosting services.

I have disabled the webmail spam filters (for my account o nly, of course), which has still been sending about 2/3 - 3/4 of my legitimate mail to the junk mailbox. It's getting tedious.

 

[eyec]

when was the last time you checked your Godaddy Account settings? they have recently moved servers and maybe some of your settings got messed up.

i have used Godaddy for over 5 years with no email problems, but i have the spam/junk settings turned off and use my email (Thunderbird) filters for that purpose, set up with SMTP relaying.

 

[jlockley]

Well that explains the changes. I checked the settings on web mail and turned off spam entirely - it was on low before - so we will see what happens there. Thanks for the tip.

I have been extremely satisfied with Godaddy all in all, but if we don't receive incoming mail, it's not going to work. What perplexes me is that mail returned to our address does not reach us unless forwarded over the GMail address, and <i>there is no bounce message.</i> Bizarre.

I've been clicking around the web for mail hosting, but nobody shows the prices. I think Godaddy is pretty affordable.

 

[jlockley]

Would you do me a favor and have a look at this header. The sender is on my allowed list, and I have spam filters turned off. What has me puzzled is the final line of the header. x-spam: blacklist

If I am right, most of my mail comes in with "whitelist".

I have seen a couple of these lately, I think mostly Comcast, and 76.126.195.59 seems to be listed on Sorbs and Spamhaus. I am wondering if the problem is that a couple of the larger providers have got themselves on rbl's.



Received: (qmail 22355 invoked from network); 15 Oct 2008 16:14:34 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO pre-smtp29-01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net) ([10.0.19.129])
(envelope-sender <snip@comcast.net>)
by smtp11-01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (qmail-1.03) with SMTP
for <snip.com>; 15 Oct 2008 16:14:34 -0000
Received: (qmail 29084 invoked from network); 15 Oct 2008 16:14:33 -0000
Received: from qmta08.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net ([76.96.62.80])
(envelope-sender <snip@comcast.net>)
by pre-smtp29-01.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP
for <snip.com>; 15 Oct 2008 16:14:33 -0000
Received: from OMTA13.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net ([76.96.62.52])
by QMTA08.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net with comcast
id T2Ps1a01Y17dt5G584ETTP; Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:14:27 +0000
Received: from c-76-126-195-59.hsd1.ca.comcast.net ([76.126.195.59])
by OMTA13.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net with comcast
id T4EX1a00E1HMymc3Z4EYfD; Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:14:33 +0000
X-Authority-Analysis: v=1.0 c=1 a=b4KrJKo_AAAA:8 a=-EtbDDV7OYhTYUEtB4YA:9
a=tTdOHT0wfJrDAy6z6LkA:7 a=SvG0Op6XVaoO9rcGwoQ5avqFU2MA:4 a=Zx432gaBumwA:10
a=7izZGwdaXvoA:10 a=l1cPW_rqd20A:10 a=0fHMQFK8kj8A:10 a=5Znf3N6VcfQA:10
a=vVMNtHUC-kcA:10 a=si9q_4b84H0A:10 a=X0yfWqRIasIA:10 a=u54gTzh75vAA:10
a=sNEyDEdYjLsA:10 a=Ru-UVeBo5F7xOpkeyZAA:9 a=6KnvD091xr8lWs84HPIA:7
a=ri4PNYZSWs3aYIMGukNRijqkc2sA:4 a=JOGRpQvhDTMA:10 a=37WNUvjkh6kA:10
Message-Id: <D3708444-7D2F-4E31-8070-D6DBEBAD90A2@comcast.net>
From: <snip@comcast.net>
To: <snip>
In-Reply-To: <20081003184436.3b26f53b8dce11dde2d0b375b1068572.e18fe3ea97.wbe@email.secureserver.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=Apple-Mail-1-966934822
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v929.2)
Subject: Re: Meeting
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:14:30 -0700
References: <20081003184436.3b26f53b8dce11dde2d0b375b1068572.e18fe3ea97.wbe@email.secureserver.net>
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.929.2)
X-Spam: Blacklist

 

[jlockley]

An added note. From about 200 email a day I am down to perhaps 30, most of which go into Bulk. Another candidate called and asked if we had received information which we hadn't. The resend also landed alone in the Bulk box.

 

[jlockley]

It's not me, Babe. I did a search for "Godaddy blocking mail" and came up with enough for two lifetimes. Here the letter to tech support. Just for y'all's entertainment. Now who has good email hosting?

______________________________________________________

It's not just me. You are apparently famous for this nonsense. See below:

http://forums.techarena.in/small-business-server/583406.htm

http://pcnorb.blogspot.com/2008/06/godaddy-is-blocking-my-mail.html

http://devver.net/blog/2008/07/crappy-email-filtering-on-godaddy/

http://modwest.typepad.com/modwest_blog/2007/04/godaddy_helo_eh.html

(Earlier this week we learned that GoDaddy was blocking legitimate mail from Modwest customers to GoDaddy customers. A quick call to their HQ revealed that they were blocking one of our mail servers because of a "bogus helo" problem, which, in their words, generally indicated the presence of a spam or virus outbreak. Once we eliminated this possibility and ensured our strict spam policies were being followed, I asked Mike, our senior sysadmin and Operations Manager, for his analysis of the GoDaddy's policy. Here's what he had to say

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?messageID=98716(I've

been wrestling with their customer support as well. The Spamhaus Policy Block List is just a list of dynamic IP addresses, so it makes sense that the EC2 addresses are on that. But it doesn't make sense for Go Daddy to use that list for blocking URLs.

Even the Spamhaus FAQ states " PBL should not be used for URI-based blocking!" (

http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Spamhaus PBL#187).

I tried quoting that to the Go Daddy customer support, and they sent me a reply saying they were going to look into it. But after a few days I just got another email saying it was their policy and they weren't going to change it.

We're planning on changing our website to disallow people from signing up with an email address that is handled by Go Daddy. We'll show an error informing them of the broken mail server, and tell them to use a different address. It's not an ideal solution, but we don't have many options. Maybe once Go Daddys customers start complaining about it they'll reconsider their crazy policy.
Message was edited by: malone )

and many more, a few printed out below. I have been told that Godaddy has recently shifted some of the mail servers. Let me guess with no skills to do it, that the above policy was set in place for the new server. If Godaddy unblocks the server, then we will not have to look for an alternate mail service, which would be frankly, a huge pain in the neck.

Elective reading below:




GoDaddy Email Just Doesn't Cut It.
Posted on 16 November 2007 by admin

GoDaddy email problems

Not receiving your product download link?

Did you know that people may not be able to email you because of GoDaddy's ridiculous spam system? It's true and it happens alot when we try sending out email to customers that require an email product link for download.

GoDaddy is known to block entire IP pools instead of domains in effort to block spam and viruses and end up blocking legitimate emails in the process. Minutes after the sender send an email, they will receive a bounced back message with:

"554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content"



This message is triggered when sending a basic download link to our customers, obviously this is bad in many fronts. This email issue leads us to lost sales in the e-commerce world so we do not recommend using them for hosting services., not until they fix this issue.

We DO NOT have this email issue with any other company and is only isolated to GoDaddy, and when a customer calls asking why they have not received email I always ask, "Your hosted by GoDaddy correct?", they always say yup. Our customers know and we have the email to prove it.

If you are not receiving your email, please call or send us an alternative email address for us to send your download link, thank you for your patience.

Godaddy under the secureserver.net banner uses poor filtering techniques to block entire IP pools instead of blocking domainsin an effort too control spam and virus activity. Unfortunatly Spammers know how to work around this and it ends up blocking out only the legitimate emails of unfortunate people who stil use the secureserver.net servers to get email. They also use a whitelist of ISP servers in an effort to get people to redirect thier mail thru one of their servers. Most ISPs are not on this list. Their mail gets blocked. I have spoken with a woman who says she was with "the office of the president" and said they did not plan on upgrading thier policy and is convinced there is nothing wrong with their system. I am currently in the process of having to move over twenty domains with email to another location because Godaddy just cant get it right. Its kind of sad considering how easy it is to fix.


GoDaddy is rejecting mail with URLs that appear in the Spamhaus PBL. As this thread on the Amazon EC2 forum notes, this is creating false positives, causing nonspam mail to be rejected. Here's what GoDaddy reportedly said about this policy:

Unfortunately, our system is set to reject mails sent from or including links listed in the SBL, PBL or XBL. Because the IP address associated to [REMOVED] is listed in the PBL, any emails containing a link to this site will be rejected. This includes plain-text emails including this information.

If this is true, it's utterly broken.

Spamhaus explicitly warn that this is not to be done, on the PBL page:

Do not use PBL in filters that do any ‘deep parsing' of Received headers, or for other than checking IP addresses that hand off to your mailservers.

And more explicitly in the Spamhaus PBL FAQ:

PBL should not be used for URI-based blocking! Consider the false positive potential: legitimate webservers hosted with services such as dyndns.com or ath.cx! Or consider that ISPs and other networks are encouraged to list any IP ranges which should not send mail, and that could include web servers! Use SBL or XBL (or sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org) for URI blocking as described in our Effective Spam Filtering section. Use PBL only for SMTP (mail).

Critically, the PBL now lists all Amazon EC2 space, since Spamhaus interpret Amazon's policy as forbidding email to be delivered via direct SMTP from there. (Note - email, not HTTP.)

With this filter in place at GoDaddy, that now means that if you mail a URL of any page on any site hosted at EC2 to a user of GoDaddy, your mail won't get through.

Note: this is much worse than blocks of SMTP traffic from EC2. In that case, an EC2 user can relay their legit SMTP traffic via an off-EC2 host. In this case, there is no similar option in HTTP that isn't insufferably kludgy.
Tags: anti-spam, broken, ec2, filtering, godaddy, pbl, spamhaus, suck

 

[smah]

Well, that doesn't sound too good. If you dissatisfied with the service to change to something else, here's my personal suggestion (which may or may not be suitable to your circumstances)

Use an in-house linux mail server with mxlogic's e-mail defense service. Used in combination with a few select rules at the perimter firewall, this is a very secure and robust combination, but might require some additional administration and cost.

 

[jlockley]

I wish it were an option. We considered it a while back, but this is too small a business, and the people who could do it in house are on another continent (so we can't). I am really seeking a good mail service. We were with Infinex for a while, but had the opposite problem..nothing but junk, most of it pretty disgusting. I suspected they were actually selling mailing lists, but they were probably just getting hacked in five minute intervals. It looks as if Godaddy is just applying one policy incorrectly, and nobody there understands the problem. The thought of moving makes me cringe.

 

[jlockley]

just FYI, we have settled on Slicehost, a middle way between a proprietary server and a fully hosted service. For $20 /mo, the same or a little more than we are now paying for a 2gb box and two web hosting accts, we will get low support 10gb. Setting it up is killing me, as we keep getting calls from people whose mail isn't arriving. Tonight we are new, but I need some help. New post on that. I am sorry to leave Godaddy hosting, which has been very good, but financially the whole shebang needs to go on the server. Thanks a load for the suggestion.