Emails from a shared hosting provider get rejected as spam

[dc2000]

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: [email protected]? Maybe some outside service to send out emails (reliably)?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[z3r010]

Send me a test email to [removed] and I'll have a look at the headers and see if I can spot anything obvious that's causing it.

 

[dc2000]

Send me a test email to [removed] and I'll have a look at the headers and see if I can spot anything obvious that's causing it.

Thanks. Just sent you an email with a subject "Test message from dc2000".

 

[z3r010]

Yeah, the host IP is showing as blacklisted ( Email Blacklist Check - See if your server is blacklisted ) and the header also shows "dkim=policy (weak key)".[FONT=&quot]

Your SPF is good but that's your only plus, If you have a dedicated server spare is maybe worth hosting your own SMTP with at least DKIM, the host your on now will never have a very good rep due to it being shared.



[/FONT]

 

[dc2000]

Thanks a bunch. How did you get all that info that you replied to my email?

 

[z3r010]

In outlook 2010 click the little arrow at the bottom of the tags bit, then the properties box opens and the info is all in the internet headers box.

 

[dc2000]

Oh, I see. Do you know of any service that can send out emails via SMTP? (Some that has a better reputation that this shared Bluehost.) We obvious need to keep our email address.

 

[z3r010]

I currently use sendgrid.com and have used smtp.com in the past, both are really good but I do send 100's of 1000's per month and pay for a good system.

 

[dc2000]

I currently use sendgrid.com and have used smtp.com in the past, both are really good but I do send 100's of 1000's per month and pay for a good system.

I appreciate your help! sendgrid.com does seem like a bit of an overkill for us. We send out about 10-15 emails a day, most of which are bills and general responses for people's inquires. I'm curious, if anyone else knows of a smtp-type service that would let us send those emails (letting us keep our current email address.) Note that we can still receive emails at our current Bluehost.com servers.

 

[z3r010]

Dyn (I use them for our DNS) has a $3 pm for 10,000 emails package if that's any use to you.

DynECT Email Delivery Lite | Startups | Small Business | Email Delivery | SMTP

 

[dc2000]

Thanks again. You were very helpful. That DynECT service seems to be exactly what we need.

One last thing I'm going to bother you with. When I sign up for an SMTP service, how can I check that our emails sent out through them don't get thrown out as spam as well? In other words, how did you test that Bluehost IPs as spam for me?

 

[z3r010]

Send yourself an email then find the mail servers IP from the headers hten check it here - Email Blacklist Check - See if your server is blacklisted

 

[dc2000]

I just signed up for the Dyn account as you suggested. Can I send you another email and have you look at the headers?

 

[z3r010]

Yeah

 

[z3r010]

SPF pass and a clean IP.......all looks good.

 

[dc2000]

Thanks for everything!

 

[dc2000]

Just to give everyone a quick update. I spent a lot of time dealing with this issue and would like to share my experience.

As I said earlier I signed up with DynECT and I like their support, they reply to emails within a couple of hours (during business week) and my emails sent through them get delivered generally reliably. But it comes with one serious limitation -- they do not provide APIs for sending emails via scripts. They open two ports for SMTP connections, but unfortunately my dumb web hosting provider (Bluehost) blocks all outgoing ports from PHP scripts, so I can't send emails via DynECT using a script. (I need this for user email registrations.)

Later, just by accident I stumbled upon mandrill.com that is an awesome solution to my problem. They allow up to 12,000 emails a month for free with the starting rate of 25 an hour, which is promised to be increased if they see no abuse. They also provide a JSON-based API that bypasses all these ridiculous Bluehost restrictions. So I can now send emails via a php script. Awesome! I really like their service. Only if they provided a hosting service, I'd definitely switch from this horrible service I get from Bluehost...