Had enough of Bluehost spam rejections. Alternatives?
 

Hi folks,

My first post here. I run several businesses and have my sites and emails with Bluehost. Back in 2012 when I started using them they were very good but have gotten progressively worse.

I've had maybe 8+ discussions with their technical support asking for my email to be removed from their spam filter and to also change the IP because it seems I'm sharing an email server with others who've caused the IP reputation to degrade.

My question is, what are your suggestions for alternative email providers? Due to time constraints I'm keen to keep my web hosting with Bluehost and simply migrate the emails at the moment.

Thank you in advance :D

My suggestion list, all have been used by myself.

• Runbox, nothing special good but also not bad, I am using it
• Fastmail, much faster than RB above, I am also the subscriber
• Pobox, bought by FM above, 50GB mailstore account is cheap and nice
• Google Apps, perfect, except for the privacy issues
• TuffMail, web panel out of date, but the system is solid
• Gandi.net, when you transfer the domain to them, you get 1GB storage for five email accounts each domain
• Yandex, pretty good as google apps, but free, 1000 accounts for each domain IIRC
• Zoho, not as good as the providers above, but free

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm in talks with FastMail

I'm curious why they're blocking your outgoing mail. You say from their spam filter, but if they have deployed an internal filter then that shouldn't take into account other users but only your email on an individual basis. Is it by chance CloudMark?

Many providers AFAIK such as iCloud, Aliyun do block outgoing messages once they think the messages are spams.

Bluehost Blocking Outgoing Emails
 

It's finally gotten so bad it's time to move - but to where?

I also talked to tech support @ Bluehost about 6 times in the past few weeks, until they finally said they cannot adjust the outgoing mail spam filters and I'll have to live with many of my outgoing mails being blocked, with no notifications or bounces.

One by one all my BH clients are complaining about their emails not being sent.

Most emails with links or numbers like IP numbers in them are flagged and STOPPED dead. Of course most of us sometimes need to send content with something other than plain text.

When I remove the links or numbers, the mail sends as it should. But this is not viable as forms are also being blocked now.

PLEASE tell me a good web host, especially for WordPress, with good service, no email issues, and a reasonable price.

What a nightmare when I'm hosting so many sites there and they just end up saying, "No, we can't do anything." In other words, go somewhere else - OK, I will.

Appreciate any help, fixes, advice, or tips. Or just commiseration.

You're better served by having separate providers. One specializing in email service such as on of the companies that Jeffpan listed and another specializing in hosting websites

Can you use emails with your domain name at these email providers? And do these emails continue to go to the web host mail server?

Or is it a completely different service with different email addresses? Never used one. Assume you can sync with std email clients?

Traditionally we've advised the same, but honestly web-hosting is much easier to serve than e-mail hosting. We launched our small-business package ( 5 e-mail accounts + cPanel webhosting for 60$/year ) precisely for this reason. We have several customers from this forum on it and so far they all consider the WordPress much faster than on other webhosts.

These forums have many posts over the years from people not satisfied with email services provided by companies which primarily provide web hosting services. As George_B indicated, email hosting is more difficult.

Email service providers listed by Jeffpan (plus Polarismail and Luxsci, etc.) can host the mail services for your own domain. Many regard these email specialists as providing better email service than Web Hosts. There may be exceptions as pointed out by George_B/Polarismail (i.e some email providers also provide web hosting service). The split in hosting services occurs at your DNS settings. For any given domain, the MX records point to your mail provider servers, which may be completely separate from your Web host for the same domain.

Split up the web and email services.

Migrate the WordPress sites to WP-Engine

Migrate the email to LuxSci

I've referred many their way. Few have left the services over the years.

Hostgator
 

However, Bluehost and Hostgator owned by the same company, but I must say Hostgator is very good then Bluehost. I had never faced any issue with Hostgator, So if I compare Bluehost and Hostgator then, I recommend Hostgator.

HostGator has maintained their own staffing and offices, though around the time I left they were walking people out of the door daily clearly just trying to reduce the number of talented admins while increasing the number of chat techs. The goal was to have the talented admins automating actions for the chat techs to just press little “fix” buttons that ran the automations.

HostGator still relies on BlueHost though, to the point that to physically reboot a server they actually have to ask BlueHost in their customer facing live chat for someone to do it. On the software side they’ll continue to blend together more and more as the years pass, especially if the cpanel pricing changes end up hitting them because it’ll drive internal development across the brands.