Major Issue for Hostgator Users: Yahoo & AOL Rejecting Emails

4 replies
I've been a happy Hostgator user for several years and would like to stay with them for many years to come. But there is now an issue that has come up with them that could be a dealbreaker. I wonder if there are other Hostgator users on here and if they are aware of this problem so we can discuss what to do about it.

Basically what has happened is that, for some reason (some speculate too many spammers on their servers, but I'm not sure if that's why), Yahoo and AOL have decided to greylist emails coming from Hostgator's shared server accounts. This means they only accept a certain number of emails from a given email gateway in a particular period of time and once that limit is reached, they stop accepting emails from that gateway for a while.

This causes a huge problem because if you send an email through your Hostgator shared server account's email to Yahoo or AOL email addresses and it happens to be at a time that limit has already been reached on that gateway, your email will be returned as undelivered. Much worse, you may not get the notification that it was undelivered for many hours, meaning that in the interim time you will think the message went through only to find out far later that it never did. In effect, you can never really trust that an email has gone through to your intended recipient as long as this is happening.

The ultimate result of this is that it seems impossible to rely on email through any Hostgator shared server account if you ever have to send email to Yahoo or AOL email users.

There are a number of forum and blog posts and people tweeting about this. Here are some examples:

http://forums.hostgator.com/dear-new...g-t335454.html

https://www.computerfixx.biz/blog/ho...yahoo-and-aol/

https://twitter.com/reminggton/status/681919227662475265


https://twitter.com/davidbenj/status/681872085384302592

https://twitter.com/michaelh99/statu...36999602413568

https://twitter.com/FocusedCreative/...71560069406720

From what I've read, Hostgator seems to be blowing off many of the people who contact them about this. If you do manage to get hold of someone there about this, the only options they give you right now are to pay quite a bit more to move to a dedicated server - basically giving them a big raise for failing to adequately provide a service you are already paying for to get a larger service you don't actually need - or else to use some third-party service like Google Apps to route your email through. They appear to have no fix in sight. They say they have talked to Yahoo and Yahoo refuses to do anything to stop throttling their emails so there is nothing more they can do about it.

I dread having to move hosts since it's a huge pain to do when you have a number of sites and then you just end up hoping the new host, after you've gone through all that trouble, is actually reliable themselves. After so many years of being perfectly happy with Hostgator I really don't want to have to go through the hassle of changing. But this is a really significant problem since most of us at some time have to email people on services like Yahoo and AOL.

So Hostgator users: Do you know about this? Have you experienced this problem? What do you plan to do about it?
#aol #email #emails #greylisting #hostgator #issue #major #rejecting #users #yahoo
  • Profile picture of the author camohit
    Dont use Hostgator myself, so dont know anythin about that other than what u told.

    However, this means Hostgator will loose a lot of business. Time for other Hosting companies to capitalise on the opportunity. By the way the only hosting I prefer and suggest people is A2Hosting. Nothing better than that. But anyways, wish u luck in finding the solution.
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  • Profile picture of the author Oziboomer
    Originally Posted by Builder154 View Post

    So Hostgator users: Do you know about this? Have you experienced this problem? What do you plan to do about it?
    Still have sites on HG but we noticed a similar problem with another host where we had some money sites on.

    After discussion we started using a service by MailChannels which resolved our problem of ending up on blacklists because of various IP blocks.

    Not sure whether MC is just routing via Amazon but I wasn't concerned to find out because issue was resolved and deliverability has improved out of sight.
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    • Profile picture of the author Iteration
      [DELETED]
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      • Profile picture of the author Builder154
        Originally Posted by Oziboomer View Post

        Still have sites on HG but we noticed a similar problem with another host where we had some money sites on.
        This is part of what scares me. You can go to all the trouble of switching hosts, only to find out they have a similar problem.

        Originally Posted by Iteration View Post

        Is something like Mail Chimp an option for you?

        It can get quite expensive when the list grows but you can trim the people that don't open your emails, target peoples locations based on their IP and get the list to only include people that read your emails at least occassionally so when the list grows you should be able to monetize it and cover the Mail Chimp costs.

        I believe even at the best of times you can only send a very limited number of emails per hour and with HostGator a lot of these emails end up in the spam folder which the majority of people don't check.

        I have a couple of sites on HostGator and am thinking about using their email sign up form as Mail Chimp recently started allowing people to import their lists from elsewhere into the Mail Chimp database so its a low cost option at the beginning before you move to a more professional (and expensive) option.
        I'm not even talking about emailing a list. For a larger email list, yes I would use a service like MailChimp. I'm just talking about normal day-to-day, person-to-person email. Now you see why this is such a problem? I may one day just need to send one single email to someone on a Yahoo address. But because of the throttling, if the limit from Hostgator's gateway is reached for the day, even though I'm only sending one email to one person, it will be returned (usually many hours later) as undelivered.

        So this is how big the problem is. You can't even rely on your ability to send a single email to anyone on Yahoo or AOL through Hostgator if you're on a shared server. Sometimes the email will end up going through, but many times it won't and you never can even tell when it will or won't until hours after you send it.

        I'm surprised there isn't more talk about this on the forum here. Hostgator is one of the bigger hosting companies and this is a pretty big problem. I wonder if people are seeing the undelivered emails but just not realizing the problem is with Hostgator. For a while, I thought the problem was with the people I was sending to.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sumon2k7
    Another complain related Hostgator. I've ignored Hostgator due to their bad email responding service and seems like my decision was right, because now the problem you're facing is too annoying.
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