Emails from a shared hosting provider Bluehost get rejected as spam

dc2000 · 24 Mar 2013, 05:26 AM

I am getting very frustrated with this web hosting provider -- Bluehost.com. We have several small business sites hosted with them. We also use email accounts provided by the Bluehost for our outgoing and incoming mail. We use Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 to send/retrieve emails. Recently we've started receiving a lot of bounced emails back with messages as such:

Your e-mail was not delivered to the recipient because of bad reputation of its server sending the e-mail. For more information contact the administrator of your server of the SMTP.

Note that we do not send out any unsolicited emails.

I sent several support tickets to Bluehost and has not yet received a meaningful reply.

I'm curious, what is the way to send out emails in this case -- still preserving our email address: name@oursite.com? Maybe some outside service to send out emails (reliably)?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

n5bb · 24 Mar 2013, 11:30 AM

Welcome to the EMD Forums, dc2000!

I'm not familiar with Bluehost, so I can't give you any specific recommendations about their services. But you might consider another email provider. I use Fastmail (http://www.fastmail.fm), which has specific subforums here at EMD Forums. They are a company from Australia now owned by Opera Software. Their main servers are in a big datacenter in New York City, NY.

Fastmail lets you use your own domains with their service as long as you have at least an Enhanced level account (or equivalent family or business account). They are not a domain reseller, but they can host your email, including providing the DNS. Some advantages of using Fastmail for your domain DNS and email include:

Easy to use DNS control panel which lets you configure your domain records, including A records (websites, including subdomains), MX records (email), and other records (such as those used for FTP, CSV, DKIM, SPF).
They provide preconfigured email reputation DNS features (CSV, DKIM, and SPF) if you are using their SMTP server to send email. This means that they are responsible for maintaining the reputation of their sending servers, and they have alarms set up to alert their staff (mostly in Australia and Norway) about any problems.
Fastmail uses various methods of achieving reliability. I have had an account with them using my personal domain for 9 years and have never had a lost message. As they have become larger over the years, they have made big improvements in keeping their service active 24/7, and in my opinion they are just as reliable as the large providers such as Gmail or Yahoo or Microsoft Outlook.com (all of which have glitches from time to time).
https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html
You can use several ways to improve the security of login passwords, including one-time password lists and full or restricted logins. You can see which sessions are logged in to webmail sessions, and terminate any of these. There is a login log which shows all access to your account from webmail or an email client in the past two weeks.
They have webmail which works for all the popular browsers on a PC or Mac or iOS (iPhone or iPad) or other mobile device. The mobile device automatically shows a simplified web interface for use on the small screen.
You can also use an email client, such as Outlook or Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc.
In addition to these email features, you have the ability to store quite a bit of cloud data on their servers, for photo albums, simple websites (no server-side scripting), FTP or DAV or web-based file transfer with passwords, etc.

Bill

lane · 24 Mar 2013, 09:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by n5bb

Fastmail lets you use your own domains with their service as long as you have at least an Enhanced level account (or equivalent family or business account).

Actually, if you purchase a family or business account, you do not need to buy the Enhanced level equivalent to be able to use your own domain, as that comes automatically with the family/business account. For example, if your usage and/or storage needs are low, you could purchase a family account ($5) plus one user at the Lite level (+$10, total $15), and use your own domain - I am currently doing this with a family account. This is much less than an Enhanced account ($40) or the family equivalent (more or less) Superior user level ($5 + $40).

soromak · 25 Mar 2013, 02:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lane

Actually, if you purchase a family or business account, you do not need to buy the Enhanced level equivalent to be able to use your own domain, as that comes automatically with the family/business account. For example, if your usage and/or storage needs are low, you could purchase a family account ($5) plus one user at the Lite level (+$10, total $15), and use your own domain - I am currently doing this with a family account. This is much less than an Enhanced account ($40) or the family equivalent (more or less) Superior user level ($5 + $40).

Actually, if you are interested in hosting your domains at the company with a decent customer support, decent amount of storage for far more reasonable fee and having your mail, contacts and calendars synced across different devices, then I would recommend browse these forums and look elsewhere. There are providers discussed here that give you much better value for your money than FM. Anyhow before you decide to change I would recommend applying for a trial and see which one suits you most.

EdinwolfPA · 25 Mar 2013, 10:03 PM

Hello,

I would recommend viewing this thread:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=64118

David

William9 · 26 Mar 2013, 08:26 PM

dc2000,
I use BlueHost for a couple of websites and find it a good value and reliable for that purpose.
However, as others have indicated above, it's very good advice to have a specialist provide your email services. Based on my reading posts here for years, it's obvious to me that Website hosts in general are not the best email service providers. There are several good email service providers for your own domain. In addition to FastMail described really well by n5bb in this thread, if you're willing to pay for high-end service (quality, reliability, and especially excellent customer service) you should consider LuxSci. There many others to choose from.

dc2000 · 9 Apr 2013, 06:29 AM

Thank you, everyone. And sorry... I didn't get an email about replies here.

I did find what I was looking for. The service called mandrill.com provides exactly what I need, and it is free for the first 12,000 emails a month, plus they also provide JSON-based APIs to send emails via (PHP) scripts. So I went with them....

PS. And about Bluehost. They used to be good. That's why I signed up with them, but now their tech support is horrible. I don't know what happened? Change in management? Different owner? All I know is that I had a very bad experience with them recently. Plus evidently they rent their servers to whoever can pay their bill. So the servers are full of spammers, and god-knows-who-else. I checked (my own) site logs and the database is down on a regular basis. So the bottom line, I'm looking for a new web hosting provider.

jeffpan · 9 Apr 2013, 03:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc2000

Thank you, everyone. And sorry... I didn't get an email about replies here.

I did find what I was looking for. The service called mandrill.com provides exactly what I need, and it is free for the first 12,000 emails a month, plus they also provide JSON-based APIs to send emails via (PHP) scripts. So I went with them....

PS. And about Bluehost. They used to be good. That's why I signed up with them, but now their tech support is horrible. I don't know what happened? Change in management? Different owner? All I know is that I had a very bad experience with them recently. Plus evidently they rent their servers to whoever can pay their bill. So the servers are full of spammers, and god-knows-who-else. I checked (my own) site logs and the database is down on a regular basis. So the bottom line, I'm looking for a new web hosting provider.

You'd have the change to buy a VPS (with Linode, for example) thus control everything by yourself.

hobbes · 18 Apr 2013, 12:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffpan

You'd have the change to buy a VPS (with Linode, for example) thus control everything by yourself.

Not exactly. Search the Linode forums, and you'll find many people tearing their hair out because Yahoo particularly put email from Linode IP's into the Spam folder, even though the sending mailserver confirms to all the requirements that Yahoo stipulate. This problem applies to many shared/VPS provider IP's.

At the end of the day, the receiving mail server can do what it jolly well likes with an email, and there's (sometimes) nothing the sender can do about it. For example, I reject all mail sent from IP's on the zen.spamhaus.org list. That's my perogative, and the sender of emails from IP's on that list will not get very far complaining to me.

I used to have a Linode VPS, but am now on prgmr.com. On both setups, I've configured my mail server to route outbound emails through Fastmail's SMTP server, for $5 a year. Works well for me.

kijinbear · 18 Apr 2013, 12:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hobbes

Not exactly. Search the Linode forums, and you'll find many people tearing their hair out because Yahoo particularly put email from Linode IP's into the Spam folder, even though the sending mailserver confirms to all the requirements that Yahoo stipulate. This problem applies to many shared/VPS provider IP's.

Exactly. Smart companies like Fastmail use proper tools to detect spam, but large and old companies like Yahoo tend to use blunt, outdated tools with lots of collateral damage. The only way to deliver mail reliably to such companies is for you to become big enough that they can't afford to ignore you. Even then, they'll just add your IPs to an internal whitelist and continue to act like arseholes to everyone else. I just talked with some stupid third-world free email provider that keeps refusing one of my clients' legitimate newsletters. They asked me for a list of every IP address that is used by my client, preferably exclusively. I said f*** you, my client uses Amazon SES which has 18,432 IP addresses (two /22s and one /18) listed in their SPF record, go grab the list yourself. And they don't even care that every email my client sends is signed with DKIM.

Given such an unfortunate reality, it is generally a good idea to use a third-party service that already have understandings -- either explicit or implicit -- with most of the big guys. Most of the best paid email services that people talk about on this forum fall into this category. So do online services that specialize in email sending, like MailChimp/Mandrill, Postmark, and Amazon SES (not as reliable as the others, as you can see in my anecdote above). They have spent a lot of man-hours trying to ensure that their emails find their way into the proper recipient's Inbox.

ccl1 · 18 Apr 2013, 01:28 AM

in cases like these i always value customer support. i'm not the most technically inclined, so if i need help or have a question, it gives a lot of peace of mind to get a reply back in a timely manner. i used to be with this hosting company that had no online support ticket system. no online chat. the only way to get a human being was to call their phone number, and then i would be put on hold for a while, before getting transferred to someone in india. needless to say it was frustrating to say the least.

with that being said, if you are considering switching companies, you might want to look into mrmail.com. they offer zimbra for email hosting, and website hosting as well. neither is dependent on the other. for example i have my email set up with them and my website set up with another company. what i like about mrmail is how quickly they reply back to support tickets. they're really helpful and patient. they explain things in a way that even i can understand lol. they helped me transfer all my old emails to zimbra, they helped when i had questions about zimbra, they even added some extra zimlets for my account. i dont generally 'advertise' businesses like this, but that is how impressed i was with them.

if you are looking to have your email and web hosting separate. i can vouch for hostlatte. not sure what you hosting needs are, but i was really impressed with their expedient customer support. they helped with migrating my website to their servers. which was great b/c i had no clue how to do it on my own lol. typically i would send out a support ticket and get a reply back less than 20 minutes. they too were very patient, friendly and helpful.

hobbes · 18 Apr 2013, 07:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ccl1

in cases like these i always value customer support. ...

... what i like about mrmail is how quickly they reply back to support tickets. they're really helpful and patient. they explain things in a way that even i can understand lol. ....

if you are looking to have your email and web hosting separate. i can vouch for hostlatte. not sure what you hosting needs are, but i was really impressed with their expedient customer support. they helped with migrating my website to their servers. ....

You're missing the point.

You can have the best company, give out gold nuggets to your customers, have the very best email server setup in the world, and conform to all the SMTP standards, and beyond.... but, if the receiving mail server doesn't like your IP, or the font you used or [insert arbitrary criteria here] your mail might be undelivered or shunted into the spam folder. Customer service on the sending side is often powerless to change this. Just check the Linode forums.

Until there is an RFC standard for what email a server must accept (LOL! Will never happen) we are all at the mercy of the receiving mail policies, not the sending policies.

Trip · 19 Apr 2013, 12:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc2000

PS. And about Bluehost. They used to be good. That's why I signed up with them, but now their tech support is horrible. I don't know what happened? Change in management? Different owner? All I know is that I had a very bad experience with them recently. Plus evidently they rent their servers to whoever can pay their bill. So the servers are full of spammers, and god-knows-who-else. I checked (my own) site logs and the database is down on a regular basis. So the bottom line, I'm looking for a new web hosting provider.

You're very close. To shed a little light on things, BlueHost, as well as HostGator, iPage and several other sizeable webhosts (many of which populate the "Top 10 Webhosts" affiliate payout sites), are all owned by a conglomerate known as Endurance International Group (EIG), evidently considered by many to be a plague in the hosting world. Widespread reports (many documented at WebHostingTalk) detail EIG taking over companies and within a timeframe of literally days to months from takeover, service and support declining rapidly, as personnel are outsourced overseas and overheads are slashed, purportedly for the streamlining of margins and realignment of the business model to fit the new exit strategy.

In your search for a new provider, it would be my strong suggestion to head over to WHT and counsel the veterans there for referrals based on your needs. Chances are, you'd stand a better chance of being satisfied with your next hosting purchase by doing that than if you simply proceeded to follow the links of any one of the many as-before-mentioned "Top Hosts" sites out there.

Best of luck moving forward!

ccl1 · 21 Apr 2013, 05:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hobbes

You're missing the point.

You can have the best company, give out gold nuggets to your customers, have the very best email server setup in the world, and conform to all the SMTP standards, and beyond.... but, if the receiving mail server doesn't like your IP, or the font you used or [insert arbitrary criteria here] your mail might be undelivered or shunted into the spam folder. Customer service on the sending side is often powerless to change this. Just check the Linode forums.

Until there is an RFC standard for what email a server must accept (LOL! Will never happen) we are all at the mercy of the receiving mail policies, not the sending policies.

not really. if that happened to me, and it was a huge importance, then i would switch providers.

kayrosburg · 2 Oct 2013, 03:56 AM

We currently use Bluehost to do our web hosting and use their email services because it's included in our yearly fee. We have had a LOT of trouble over the last few weeks with both sending and receiving emails. Although they are fairly easy to reach via live chat or on the phone, they have not been able to respond in a productive way to this problem. We just have to keep "waiting to be removed from spamcop and trendmicros' blacklists" - well we may get removed but then get plunked right back on when someone on the same server sends out spam. So....reading through these forums, my question is, do the email providers that are touted here, i.e. mandrill, fastmail, polarismail, etc., sync using IMAP (for my other "idevices")?? This is a priority for me, as are the financial considerations involved. With Bluehost, I don't pay a "per user" fee. These other providers seem to use this per user model. We are small - only 8 emails, but still....I've been getting the email service for "free". Would going with the VPS that Bluehost provides at $30/month be a good option? Hoping to hear from any one with advice!!

24 Mar 2013, 05:26 AM	#1
dc2000 Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2013 Posts: 19	Emails from a shared hosting provider Bluehost get rejected as spam I am getting very frustrated with this web hosting provider -- Bluehost.com. We have several small business sites hosted with them. We also use email accounts provided by the Bluehost for our outgoing and incoming mail. We use Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 to send/retrieve emails. Recently we've started receiving a lot of bounced emails back with messages as such: Your e-mail was not delivered to the recipient because of bad reputation of its server sending the e-mail. For more information contact the administrator of your server of the SMTP. Note that we do not send out any unsolicited emails. I sent several support tickets to Bluehost and has not yet received a meaningful reply. I'm curious, what is the way to send out emails in this case -- still preserving our email address: name@oursite.com? Maybe some outside service to send out emails (reliably)? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

24 Mar 2013, 11:30 AM	#2
n5bb Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: May 2004 Location: Irving, Texas Posts: 8,929	Welcome to the EMD Forums, dc2000! I'm not familiar with Bluehost, so I can't give you any specific recommendations about their services. But you might consider another email provider. I use Fastmail (http://www.fastmail.fm), which has specific subforums here at EMD Forums. They are a company from Australia now owned by Opera Software. Their main servers are in a big datacenter in New York City, NY. Fastmail lets you use your own domains with their service as long as you have at least an Enhanced level account (or equivalent family or business account). They are not a domain reseller, but they can host your email, including providing the DNS. Some advantages of using Fastmail for your domain DNS and email include: Easy to use DNS control panel which lets you configure your domain records, including A records (websites, including subdomains), MX records (email), and other records (such as those used for FTP, CSV, DKIM, SPF). They provide preconfigured email reputation DNS features (CSV, DKIM, and SPF) if you are using their SMTP server to send email. This means that they are responsible for maintaining the reputation of their sending servers, and they have alarms set up to alert their staff (mostly in Australia and Norway) about any problems. Fastmail uses various methods of achieving reliability. I have had an account with them using my personal domain for 9 years and have never had a lost message. As they have become larger over the years, they have made big improvements in keeping their service active 24/7, and in my opinion they are just as reliable as the large providers such as Gmail or Yahoo or Microsoft Outlook.com (all of which have glitches from time to time). https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html You can use several ways to improve the security of login passwords, including one-time password lists and full or restricted logins. You can see which sessions are logged in to webmail sessions, and terminate any of these. There is a login log which shows all access to your account from webmail or an email client in the past two weeks. They have webmail which works for all the popular browsers on a PC or Mac or iOS (iPhone or iPad) or other mobile device. The mobile device automatically shows a simplified web interface for use on the small screen. You can also use an email client, such as Outlook or Thunderbird or Apple Mail, etc. In addition to these email features, you have the ability to store quite a bit of cloud data on their servers, for photo albums, simple websites (no server-side scripting), FTP or DAV or web-based file transfer with passwords, etc. Bill

25 Mar 2013, 10:03 PM	#5
EdinwolfPA Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: PA Posts: 683	See this thread Hello, I would recommend viewing this thread: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=64118 David

9 Apr 2013, 06:29 AM	#7
dc2000 Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2013 Posts: 19	Thank you, everyone. And sorry... I didn't get an email about replies here. I did find what I was looking for. The service called mandrill.com provides exactly what I need, and it is free for the first 12,000 emails a month, plus they also provide JSON-based APIs to send emails via (PHP) scripts. So I went with them.... PS. And about Bluehost. They used to be good. That's why I signed up with them, but now their tech support is horrible. I don't know what happened? Change in management? Different owner? All I know is that I had a very bad experience with them recently. Plus evidently they rent their servers to whoever can pay their bill. So the servers are full of spammers, and god-knows-who-else. I checked (my own) site logs and the database is down on a regular basis. So the bottom line, I'm looking for a new web hosting provider. Last edited by dc2000 : 9 Apr 2013 at 06:36 AM.

2 Oct 2013, 03:56 AM	#15
kayrosburg Junior Member Join Date: Oct 2013 Posts: 2	Bluehost/email providers We currently use Bluehost to do our web hosting and use their email services because it's included in our yearly fee. We have had a LOT of trouble over the last few weeks with both sending and receiving emails. Although they are fairly easy to reach via live chat or on the phone, they have not been able to respond in a productive way to this problem. We just have to keep "waiting to be removed from spamcop and trendmicros' blacklists" - well we may get removed but then get plunked right back on when someone on the same server sends out spam. So....reading through these forums, my question is, do the email providers that are touted here, i.e. mandrill, fastmail, polarismail, etc., sync using IMAP (for my other "idevices")?? This is a priority for me, as are the financial considerations involved. With Bluehost, I don't pay a "per user" fee. These other providers seem to use this per user model. We are small - only 8 emails, but still....I've been getting the email service for "free". Would going with the VPS that Bluehost provides at $30/month be a good option? Hoping to hear from any one with advice!!

26 Mar 2013, 08:26 PM	#6
William9 The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: San Francisco Posts: 2,281	dc2000, I use BlueHost for a couple of websites and find it a good value and reliable for that purpose. However, as others have indicated above, it's very good advice to have a specialist provide your email services. Based on my reading posts here for years, it's obvious to me that Website hosts in general are not the best email service providers. There are several good email service providers for your own domain. In addition to FastMail described really well by n5bb in this thread, if you're willing to pay for high-end service (quality, reliability, and especially excellent customer service) you should consider LuxSci. There many others to choose from.

18 Apr 2013, 01:28 AM	#11
ccl1 Essential Contributor Join Date: Aug 2012 Posts: 236	in cases like these i always value customer support. i'm not the most technically inclined, so if i need help or have a question, it gives a lot of peace of mind to get a reply back in a timely manner. i used to be with this hosting company that had no online support ticket system. no online chat. the only way to get a human being was to call their phone number, and then i would be put on hold for a while, before getting transferred to someone in india. needless to say it was frustrating to say the least. with that being said, if you are considering switching companies, you might want to look into mrmail.com. they offer zimbra for email hosting, and website hosting as well. neither is dependent on the other. for example i have my email set up with them and my website set up with another company. what i like about mrmail is how quickly they reply back to support tickets. they're really helpful and patient. they explain things in a way that even i can understand lol. they helped me transfer all my old emails to zimbra, they helped when i had questions about zimbra, they even added some extra zimlets for my account. i dont generally 'advertise' businesses like this, but that is how impressed i was with them. if you are looking to have your email and web hosting separate. i can vouch for hostlatte. not sure what you hosting needs are, but i was really impressed with their expedient customer support. they helped with migrating my website to their servers. which was great b/c i had no clue how to do it on my own lol. typically i would send out a support ticket and get a reply back less than 20 minutes. they too were very patient, friendly and helpful.