Email issues - blacklist maybe?

[Buffalo]

Last year I moved my co. web hosting to GoDaddy UK and changed my emails to their cPanel hosting. No real issues with anything, until this past week when I have been trying to send a number of emails to various people at the same external company. All emails are showing as sent from my side but they are not received at the other end.

The company in question usually operates a quarantine system, where if an email is selected as junk, the receiver gets a message asking if they wish to receive it. This isn't happening, so while I can't be sure it isn't being junked, it doesn't feel like it. Plus I have never had an issue with being junked before.

Tried GoDaddy support. All they can do is try flog me an Exchange account (I wouldn't mind but it seems rather more expensive than if I just went to Microsoft direct..... )

My settings all seem to be correct. Apart from that though, I am stuck what to do next.

Anyone else dealt with this before and may be able to offer some advice?

Thanks.

[bitchstewie]

Any sensible system will send an undeliverable report to the sender if they've rejected an email.

If you've not received one it's probably safe to assume the receiving email system has it, but what they've done with it is something that only the recipients IT team will be able to tell you.

Exchange Online and Google Apps are £3/month - honestly do yourself a favour and switch to one of those.

[sunbeam alpine]

bhstewie said:

Any sensible system will send an undeliverable report to the sender if they've rejected an email.

Not all systems do this - I know our mail servers just "drop" what they calculate to be spam mail, and they do use black lists as well as (I think) SpamAssassin to evaluate mails.

OP - ff you enter the details of your outgoing mail server in one of the blacklist checkers (Google for details) you should easily see whether your server is on a blacklist.

[bitchstewie]

sunbeam alpine said:

Not all systems do this - I know our mail servers just "drop" what they calculate to be spam mail, and they do use black lists as well as (I think) SpamAssassin to evaluate mails.

Hence "sensible" Having an email server that is arbitrarily deleting/dropping email without notifying the sender or the recipient isn't a great move IMO.

The thing with blacklist checkers is almost any mail server will be on at least one, and you have no way of knowing which blacklists the recipient(s) are using unless they tell you - and a good time for them to do this would be as part of the reject code when they reject the message.

[plasticpig]

bhstewie said:

Any sensible system will send an undeliverable report to the sender if they've rejected an email.

If you've not received one it's probably safe to assume the receiving email system has it, but what they've done with it is something that only the recipients IT team will be able to tell you.

Exchange Online and Google Apps are £3/month - honestly do yourself a favour and switch to one of those.

I disagree. Telling a spammer that their email has been rejected as being spam is just confirming to the spammer that the email address is active.

[TooMany2cvs]

bhstewie said:

sunbeam alpine said:

Not all systems do this - I know our mail servers just "drop" what they calculate to be spam mail, and they do use black lists as well as (I think) SpamAssassin to evaluate mails.

Hence "sensible" Having an email server that is arbitrarily deleting/dropping email without notifying the sender or the recipient isn't a great move IMO.

Just wait until some unmitigated spunkbubble of a spammer decides to use YOUR address as the from: on their latest batch of foetid ste.

You'll quickly decide that you really DO prefer the egregious bks to just be dumped quietly, as you wilt under thousands of delivery failures for st you never sent.

[PotatoSalad]

Try this:

https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Also check if the SPN records match your current mail server.

[TwistingMyMelon]

Are other people getting yoru emails?

Setup a test hotmail account and email that

[Buffalo]

TwistingMyMelon said:

Are other people getting yoru emails?

Setup a test hotmail account and email that

I have an old hotmail address. It did get there but went to junk.

[Buffalo]

I sent an email to my personal gmail account and took the IP receiving email address from that. Ran it through the mxtoolbox and it did come through as on five lists:

ivmSIP, LASHBACK, MAILSPIKE BL, SORBS NEW, SORBS SPAM.

Assume I can follow the links through mxtoolbox to delist?

Although this does not explain why they are on there in the first place...

I was considering to upgrade to an MS Exchange account because I want to access the upgraded office apps, but if I take advantage of email hosting as well, will this miraculously cure the issue, or will it just follow me?

[bitchstewie]

SORBS used to have a very bad reputation, to be fair it's been a few years so it may have changed as they're now owned by ProofPoint.

I'd be surprised if a commercial business are using SORBS as they will almost certainly be losing a ton of commercial mail too.

I'd also be surprised if moving to Godaddy's Exchange service changes things significantly.

Do check for things like hyperlinks in your email signature as things like this can cause some mail filters to flag your email as spam/phishing.

Also look into whether you're publishing a valid SPF record, if you don't know what that is or how to check start with Godaddy as they should know if they host your email and your domain name is with them.

I'll stand by my original suggestion to look at 365 or Google Apps.

[Bikerjon]

Looks like you've found the reason. Get on too many of those blacklists and many receiving systems with security software will just silently drop your email and not even bother delivering it to the recipient.

As well as getting off the blacklists you need to look at things like SPF, DKIM and DMARC which help to improve the reputation of your domain for sending email. 365 and Google Suite are usually the better options for email.

[PotatoSalad]

SNN=SPF, I hate phone keyboards...


Godaddy will use the same mail sever for thousands of customers and it's not uncommon for spammers to buy a dummy domain to distribute messages, that's how legitimate hosts end up on blacklists.

[Berz]

Have you asked the recipients to check with their IT to see if the mail is being received? If mail isn't being received at all, you have a problem. If it is received but quarantined they can tell you why (blacklists, spf, etc.) but until you find out the reason for the quarantine you are looking for a needle in a haystack.

[VEX]

Interesting, I am having a similar problem, starting at a similar time, sending from a TSO account to Hotmail, and I believe TSO are now part of the GoDaddy group.

I'll message them and see if they are seeing anything.

V.

[Buffalo]

Berz said:

Have you asked the recipients to check with their IT to see if the mail is being received? If mail isn't being received at all, you have a problem. If it is received but quarantined they can tell you why (blacklists, spf, etc.) but until you find out the reason for the quarantine you are looking for a needle in a haystack.

I did ask but was met with varying degrees of don't know/care. As I said most clients use similar corporate systems where suspected spam is quarantined and the receiver gets a request to accept or deny the emails. However this generally was not happening as far as I know. Plus, they probably see delivery of my emails to them as my issue (I know I would if I was them) - it should just "work"...

While I would like to have delved further I can't really afford the time. I have changed the service to an exchange account (direct from MS at a much more reasonable rate than that offered by godaddy ) and so far seem to have resolved the issue.