Hello guys. So I got an email from the Whois Team from whois.com. They are letting their customers know that there was an IP Blacklist on their shared hosted servers. This means that some mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail will not receive any emails sent from the shared hosting email’s IP Address. This is a warning to all of you PHP users out there. If you are reluctant to switch to an SMTP protocol such as PHPMailer or Swift Mailer, then this will open your eyes that the PHP default mail() function WILL NOT send your emails to Gmail, Hotmail, or any free public email services who have your web hosting’s IP Address on their IP Blacklist. This is now effective on whois.com and their hosting accounts.
Now, this doesn’t mean that your web hoster will get affected. However, there’s a high probability that your hosting provider will also be black listed due to too many spams. So I am suggesting that you learn how to use SMTP libraries before it’s too late. This is a warning for all PHP users who love the default mail() function.
Here’s the written email statement.
Dear Customer,
In the wake of the recent IP blacklists that we encountered on our infrastructure, we have decided to strengthen our email security policies on our shared hosting servers. After thorough investigations, we found that the main cause of IP blacklists on our shared hosting servers is because of the spam emails that are sent via few accounts. These spam emails are sent via email scripts and in most cases, the from address used is a non-existent email account.
Going forward all email accounts that need to send emails via [php/asp] scripts will need to be registered via a custom plugin that we have built inside the hosting control panel.
What do you need to do?
If you are using PHP mail function and sending emails from an email account which is either created or not created on cPanel/Plesk, please ensure that you have registered the email address in cPanel/Plesk respectively to send out emails. The steps to register an email account is mentioned in the KnowledgeBase.
In case of cPanel, this plugin will be available only in Paper Lantern theme and it is not built for the x3 theme. So you need to ensure that the cPanel theme is changed to Paper Lantern before registering your email address. The x3 theme has been deprecated by cPanel, hence we request you to move to the Paper Lantern theme at the earliest.
When does this change happen?
This change has already taken effect. So we request you to register your email addresses in control panels. If you fail to do so, unregistered email addresses mentioned in non-smtp (PHP/ASP) mail scripts will not be allowed to send emails from our server and hence, your emails will be discarded.
Please Note:
- This change will affect all Shared Hosting (single domain and multi domain), Reseller Hosting orders for all Server Locations across both Linux and Windows.
Please connect with the Support Team in case you have any questions around this.
Regards,
Team Whois