Award-winning web development since 1995
Written: April 4, 2017
I use LinkedIn every day and recently I connected with a new person living in Europe. We sent some messages back and forth using LinkedIn, then he sent me a direct email. When I replied to his email message then it quickly got bounced back. Have you ever sent an email message to a person that you know, however you quickly received a bounced back message telling you that you message wasn’t delivered? What should you do to remedy this situation?
Here’s the bounced email reply that I received today:
Bounced Email Reply
Reading this email I discovered why my email didn’t get delivered:
We all hate to receive spam email messages, so our web hosting companies that provide email services have banded together to identify the spammers, and they do this by subscribing to lists of suspected or known spammers. A blacklist has the IP addresses where spam emails are coming from, so in this case the IP address of 74.208.4.197 has been known to send out spam emails.
My web hosting company is 1and1.com, and they offered something called a shared hosting plan to keep their costs low. What that means is that when I sign up for a shared web hosting plan that there are maybe 100 or more other customers using the same email server and web server that I am using. So even if I am not personally sending out spam, there is certainly another customer of 1and1.com that is also using our shared server and they are the ones sending out the spam.
Well, these blacklist companies cannot discern between email senders, so instead they just note the entire IP address, which in this case is now blocking email from 100 or more shared hosting customers, like me. My recourse is to phone up the technical support folks at 1and1.com and alert them to this blacklist issue, then they contact each of the blacklist companies and assure them that the real spammer has been identified and stopped, so please update your blacklist and remove the IP address of 74.208.4.197
This is a process and can take hours or days to get resolved, so my options to work around this issue for my one email address going to this one recipient are to:
The Internet is a complex place and sometimes our email messages will be bounced back, so take hope, call up your web hosting vendor and explain what has happened and get them to go and advocate on your behalf and get your IP address off of the blacklists.
Tags: 1and1, blacklist, email
I’ve used over a dozen different web hosting companies over the years, and the company that I recommend now is called 1and1. My reasons for this recommendation are:
Having said that, I felt some panic today when I tried to login at www.1and1.com and was greeted with this screen of death:
This is the kind of screen that you would see if their web host was having issues, or worse, they were hacked.
A quick phone call to tech support provided me with the login address: my.1and1.com
Yes, I can login, however why is the main web site at www.1and1.com down this afternoon?
All of the web sites that I have hosted at 1and1 are all up and running without issue.
When I filled out a Support request on their web site it was about 10 minutes later that I got a reply e-mail asking me, “Which browser are you using?” I replied that it was Google Chrome on a Mac. Next, I tried out four other browsers and they all worked OK (Firefox on Mac, Safari on Mac, IE on Windows, Firefox on Windows).
Hmm, sounds like a browser issue and not a web hosting issue. I then went into the settings on Google Chrome on my Mac and cleared the cache, sure enough I can now browse 1and1 OK, it was a browser bug and not a 1and1 issue. You see, even an expert like me can mis-diagnose a tech issue.
Tags: 1and1, web hosting
Unfortunately I do have a client that started with Yahoo Small Business for his web hosting and we have been using WordPress so that he can make his own updates.
The issue we have now run up against is that WordPress 3.2.1 requires PHP 5 and MySQL 5 to work. Yahoo is only half-way there on supporting this because PHP 5 is allowed while MySQL 5 is not yet supported. So we are stuck using an old version of WordPress which makes our site susceptible to hacking, not something that you want to risk when running a business and depending on your web site to always be up and running.
When you search other blogs about this the reply is uniform, “Yahoo Small Business” is far behind the times and will not commit to a date for supporting the most popular blogging and web CMS platform in the world.
Sad, but true. You have been warned.
I recommend hosting with 1and1 instead, they are up with the times, support the latest WordPress, have excellent up-time, the control panel is intuitive and real people answer the phone to support you.
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Very interesting. I’ve been with 1and1 for some time, but my service seems to be not reliable at all. Customer service is also so-so.