Support » Plugin: MailPoet Newsletters (Previous) » Spam Blacklists

  • Resolved oldmankit

    (@oldmankit)


    My site is on a shared server (Bluehost) but my MX records are pointing to fastmail. It looks like this in cPanel:

    MX (Mail Exchanger)
    Priority	Host Record	Points to	TTL	ACTION
    10	@	in1-smtp.messagingengine.com	14400
    20	@	in2-smtp.messagingengine.com	14400

    I can send and receive emails no problem.

    In MailPoet > Send With... > SMTP Hostname I have box905.bluehost.com

    (This is the only way I can send email from the MailPoet plugin. I tried setting it to fastmail’s one (mail.messagingengine.com), which worked when sending from my local development server, but from the live site I get an error every time: “SMTP Error: Could not connect to SMTP host. ” I searched many forum posts to find that this is just something with the way Bluehost shared servers are set-up. I contacted their support who not only couldn’t help but were rude in the process.)

    The only problem is that when I test a newsletter with mail-tester.com, my server IP address is listed in two blacklists. The address is 67.222.38.55, which I checked is Bluehost, not fastmail.

    Since I am limited in what I can put in the SMTP Hostname in the MailPoet plugin, am I staring at a brick wall? Am I at the mercy of whether my particular shared server has accounts sending spam and therefore getting me blacklisted? Even if I pay for a service like elasticemail, I will not be able to put their SMTP hostname in the MailPoet settings.

    My mail-tester score is 7.5. (This is partly because I haven’t fully worked-out DKIM keys, so -1 for that.)

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wysija-newsletters/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Hey Oldmankit,

    You have two problem here:
    1 – Bluehost is probably blocking the SMTP ports on your shared hosted server. Which stop you from sending from the server of your choice (fastmail in your case).

    2 – You’re using a shared hosting to send emails which means that you’ll always be on blacklists, no matter how much your readers will want to receive your email, there are hundreds of people sharing the same IP as you to send emails. The probability of one or many of them sending SPAM through their site is high unfortunately.

    If you have a score of 7.5, that’s not bad, so you could probably send your emails, but I’d definitely recommend you to signup for a 3rd party SMTP service in order to stay on the safe side. We have special integration with SendGrid and ElasticEmail allowing you to avoid your host SMTP blocked ports.

    Hope this helps!

    Thread Starter oldmankit

    (@oldmankit)

    Hi Ben,

    Thanks for getting back to me on this. In the end, I’ve ditched Bluehost. (I asked support and they said they can’t unblock the port.) I’ve switched to Siteground, and am in the migration process right now. When the process is complete I’ll enter fastmail as the 3rd party SMTP service. I’ve already got an account with ElasticEmail (through your promotion) so will check that too.

    Thanks again!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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