Hi,
I have some troubles with outgoing e-mail that are really making me pull my hair out, and I'm hoping someone can help point me in the right direction. First, a brief explanation of how things are set up:
This is a business, a small office with 5 users that uses GoDaddy hosting for their website and e-mail. The users are all running various versions of Outlook (a couple still using 2003, a couple using 2007, and one using 2013) on various operating systems (a couple still on XP, a couple of Windows 7, and one on Windows 8) with POP accounts set to use GoDaddy's servers. For the most part, life is good.
Couple of weeks ago, they noticed that they're suddenly unable to send to certain recipients. We've been fine for years up until that point. It's not entire domains (for example, some verizon.net recipients or aol.com recipients receive our e-mails, while others don't). There's not any one specific domain that seems to be worse, but the problem seems to be scattered across various domains. Incoming e-mail works great, and we're having no problems there.
We don't get bounce messages at all. We send the e-mail message from Outlook, it appears to have gone out, and we think life is good. No indication that there's a problem until we get a "Hey, why didn't you respond to my e-mail?" call from the recipient a day later.
Things we've already tried:
1. Switched hosting providers. We switched from our last provider to GoDaddy. The transition was pretty smooth (it needed to be done anyway because we were having a lot of other, unrelated issues with that provider), but the problem with outgoing e-mail still exists.
2. Temporarily turning off signatures in Outlook. They have a pretty big signature that's one of those "confidentiality notice" things, so I thought it might be causing some problems. The messages aren't going through, even with the signatures turned off.
3. Sending from GoDaddy's webmail and from their mobile phones instead of Outlook. No difference.
4. Contacted GoDaddy's tech support about it. They've checked everything they know to check and can't find anything wrong. They also confirmed that all our DNS records are set up properly and that we've configured our Outlook clients properly. Our previous hosting company's tech support went through the same thing. They previous company wanted us to try and get them the full message headers from the failed messages that were in our sent items folder, which you can't even do to the best of my knowledge (everything I've found about that indicates that you can only get those from received messages). GoDaddy support also checked to make sure we weren't on any sort of blacklist that they could see.
5. Checked the domain on mxtoolbox.com. It's not on any blacklists, and it passes every check that MXToolbox can throw at it.
6. Asked a couple of the recipients to add us to their "allowed sender" lists. Still doesn't help. I'm really thinking something else has to be going on anyway, because we're having this problem with so many recipients. I'd hope we're not going to have to call every single one of them and treat it as a bunch of separate issues, considering a) these problems all happened at once and b) the problem recipients are on a lot of different domains.
7. Contacted the ISP that most of the problem recipients are using (it's a pretty major ISP in this area). They insist that they're not blocking us in any form. We actually use them as an ISP, just that we have our e-mail hosted on GoDaddy. A lot of the problem recipients have e-mail addresses from this ISP though. Some of the recipients are home users while others are businesses.
8. Switched SMTP ports on the Outlook clients from 25 to 587. Didn't make any difference. Also played around with using encryption in the server settings, which also made no difference.
Again, we don't even get bounce messages. At this point, I'm at a complete loss for troubleshooting this and have tried everything I know to try. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. I'd rather not post any details about their domain or specific e-mail addresses here for the world to see, but I might be willing to do that through PMs if someone has an idea. My gut tells me that we have to be on some kind of blacklist or have a sender reputation problem or something, but I have no idea where to look for that beyond checking MXToolbox. Was first thinking it had to be the huge signature, but considering the fact that turning off the signature in Outlook AND sending from GoDaddy's webmail (where we don't have a signature set up at all) didn't help, I feel that we can eliminate that as a potential problem.
I have some troubles with outgoing e-mail that are really making me pull my hair out, and I'm hoping someone can help point me in the right direction. First, a brief explanation of how things are set up:
This is a business, a small office with 5 users that uses GoDaddy hosting for their website and e-mail. The users are all running various versions of Outlook (a couple still using 2003, a couple using 2007, and one using 2013) on various operating systems (a couple still on XP, a couple of Windows 7, and one on Windows 8) with POP accounts set to use GoDaddy's servers. For the most part, life is good.
Couple of weeks ago, they noticed that they're suddenly unable to send to certain recipients. We've been fine for years up until that point. It's not entire domains (for example, some verizon.net recipients or aol.com recipients receive our e-mails, while others don't). There's not any one specific domain that seems to be worse, but the problem seems to be scattered across various domains. Incoming e-mail works great, and we're having no problems there.
We don't get bounce messages at all. We send the e-mail message from Outlook, it appears to have gone out, and we think life is good. No indication that there's a problem until we get a "Hey, why didn't you respond to my e-mail?" call from the recipient a day later.
Things we've already tried:
1. Switched hosting providers. We switched from our last provider to GoDaddy. The transition was pretty smooth (it needed to be done anyway because we were having a lot of other, unrelated issues with that provider), but the problem with outgoing e-mail still exists.
2. Temporarily turning off signatures in Outlook. They have a pretty big signature that's one of those "confidentiality notice" things, so I thought it might be causing some problems. The messages aren't going through, even with the signatures turned off.
3. Sending from GoDaddy's webmail and from their mobile phones instead of Outlook. No difference.
4. Contacted GoDaddy's tech support about it. They've checked everything they know to check and can't find anything wrong. They also confirmed that all our DNS records are set up properly and that we've configured our Outlook clients properly. Our previous hosting company's tech support went through the same thing. They previous company wanted us to try and get them the full message headers from the failed messages that were in our sent items folder, which you can't even do to the best of my knowledge (everything I've found about that indicates that you can only get those from received messages). GoDaddy support also checked to make sure we weren't on any sort of blacklist that they could see.
5. Checked the domain on mxtoolbox.com. It's not on any blacklists, and it passes every check that MXToolbox can throw at it.
6. Asked a couple of the recipients to add us to their "allowed sender" lists. Still doesn't help. I'm really thinking something else has to be going on anyway, because we're having this problem with so many recipients. I'd hope we're not going to have to call every single one of them and treat it as a bunch of separate issues, considering a) these problems all happened at once and b) the problem recipients are on a lot of different domains.
7. Contacted the ISP that most of the problem recipients are using (it's a pretty major ISP in this area). They insist that they're not blocking us in any form. We actually use them as an ISP, just that we have our e-mail hosted on GoDaddy. A lot of the problem recipients have e-mail addresses from this ISP though. Some of the recipients are home users while others are businesses.
8. Switched SMTP ports on the Outlook clients from 25 to 587. Didn't make any difference. Also played around with using encryption in the server settings, which also made no difference.
Again, we don't even get bounce messages. At this point, I'm at a complete loss for troubleshooting this and have tried everything I know to try. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. I'd rather not post any details about their domain or specific e-mail addresses here for the world to see, but I might be willing to do that through PMs if someone has an idea. My gut tells me that we have to be on some kind of blacklist or have a sender reputation problem or something, but I have no idea where to look for that beyond checking MXToolbox. Was first thinking it had to be the huge signature, but considering the fact that turning off the signature in Outlook AND sending from GoDaddy's webmail (where we don't have a signature set up at all) didn't help, I feel that we can eliminate that as a potential problem.
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