I’ve been having problems the last six months or so with my clients ending up on email blacklists via their shared hosting accounts with Bluehost. I have no idea how often this happens with other hosts, but it’s happening enough that I’m thinking about changing the host I recommend to clients.
I respect that fighting spam is a complex battle, but I would think a company as big as Bluehost would have it figured out and be able to keep their mail servers cleaner.
Is anyone else having this problem? If you’re with another host, how often do you have blacklist problems?
The problem with any big provider like that is that even though they do keep their mail servers cleaner than smaller providers, the extremely small percentage of spam that does go through is way way higher than for those smaller providers and so the blacklists that measure volume instead of looking at percentages incorrectly blacklist a large percentage of the web because the few large hosting providers are all the source of more spam than the smaller providers.
To avoid this problem you need to switch to a much smaller provider who is probably far more tolerant of spam but who doesn’t host enough web sites to have ended up blacklisted simply because of the relatively small volume emails they send that are spam.
I have lots of clients and domains that use a big provider (google apps email) that never have any issues. Other than that, getting a dedicated or virtual server will allow you to have a mail ip that is a lot less likely to be blacklisted.
That’s good advice Felgall, and the explanation makes sense.
EastCoast - I asked about a dedicated IP and unfortunately they said it wouldn’t help. I think what they said is that is only relevant to the server that hosts the site, not the mail server.
I think an entire dedicated server would be too much for most of my clients.
I’m not sure how Bluehost operates its email systems. Some big companies (I know that Hostgator does) will have an email gateway, using a big pool of IPs. When one gets dirty, they remove/replace it from the pool until they go through what it takes to clean it up and put it back to work. While this is still a reactive approach (the IPs still get blacklisted), it is still better than nothing.
I think an entire dedicated server would be too much for most of my clients.
A VPS (which is generally quite a bit cheaper) can also a solution. You could even use a VPS as an email server for all your customers - if you’re technically inclined.
Or you could suggest your clients to use Google Apps as their email hosting provider.
I have the same problem. The IP block my email is on was blacklisted. I reported it to Bluehost but nothing happened. They have tons of excuses but nothing done. I can see, the IPs are re-listed daily. This indicates, bluehost didn’t stop the spamming.
I requested to be moved to another block of IPs but they refused.
It’s going on for 3 weeks now.
