GoDaddy Email Fun

What do you think of when you hear someone mention GoDaddy? If “Danica Patrick” was your response, then this might not be the article for you. Anyway, pretty soon what you, and everyone, are going to think of is spam. Or, more accurately, not spam. Let me explain.

Some time back, GoDaddy implemented a change in the way their spam filter works, so that anyone who has email hosted by GoDaddy will not receive emails that contain a URL that is traced to an IP address listed on the Spamhaus PBL (for Spamhaus own description of what there PBL is click here). What does that mean? It means that if you have a website, like mycompany.com for instance, and it is hosted by somewebhost.com, and the IP address of the server that it is hosted on by somewebhost.com is listed on the Spamhaus PBL, then as an employee of My Company you send an email containing the URL of your own company’s website in your signature, then nobody with email hosted by GoDaddy is going to get your mail. In this scenario, the fact that your email is not being originated from the somewebhost.com IP address is not factored into the logic of the GoDaddy Spam filtering process. Another example is if you are sending an email with a link to espn.com to a friend whose email is hosted by GoDaddy, he may not get the email. You may have that email bounced back with the following bounce message:

Sorry, your message from to could not be delivered. The specific error is:
554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content
This is a permanent error, and the message will not be retried any further.

What? Are you serious? Another example would be if you wanted send your friend who has email hosted by GoDaddy a link to this article so that they can be informed about all the email that they have no idea they are not receiving because of the “spam” filter. Well, they may not get it. If you have your company’s website listed anywhere in your email, it may not reach anyone whose email is hosted by GoDaddy.

The way this is happening is that when an email is sent to someone who hosts their email on a GoDaddy server, GoDaddy is checking the email for viruses and spam content and a part of that process is that it will scan for any URL contained in the email and then check it against the Spamhaus PBL. This is not a logical way to use the Spamhaus PBL. If GoDaddy was checking the IP address of the server that sent the email that would be one thing. That is a legitimate way to block spam. But just because a URL is in an email does not mean that the email is coming from the IP address associated with that URL. The two are not related at all.

So the question is, why are they doing this? It is analogous to a cell phone provider scanning your text messages, and if you mention another cell phone provider in a text, they drop it so that it’s never received. GoDaddy has the ability to classify it as “spam filtering” but the reality is they are blocking completely legitimate emails from being received. Lots, and lots of them. They are aware of what they are doing, and as fare as we are aware, are not making any attempt to fix the problem.

The solution is obvious. If you are using GoDaddy as your host…stop it. Have someone else host your email. Someone like ProVision IT.

Danica Patrick needs to concentrate on racing anyway.