SMTP server

I have a number of domains, each with some email addresses. I use Hostgator for hosting these, and it all works fine for much of the time, but goes through periods of email delivery failure due to spam filtering at some receiving addresses, when using Hostgator's outgoing SMTP. These are just personal emails, not marketing emails. I have never sent marketing emails, in fact I strongly dislike email marketing!

Can anyone suggest either an alternative host which has a better reputation and doesn't have this problem (I imagine this happens with most hosts as people abuse the system), or a separate inexpensive SMTP provider with good deliverabilty? Most of the SMTP providers I've looked at seem to exist mainly for email marketing purposes, which doesn't seem a great idea! Thanks for any comments.

What about your ISP?

Edit: I use my ISP's SMTP server for all outgoing e-mails and my hosting company for POP3 (and IMAP) access to my mailboxes. I use WebFaction. It's a little more expensive that HostGator, but I like the service that I get.

Edited by deleted (Tue 26-Apr-16 13:27:11)

In reply to a post by rumster:

What about your ISP?

Edit: I use my ISP's SMTP server for all outgoing e-mails and my hosting company for POP3 (and IMAP) access to my mailboxes. I use WebFaction. It's a little more expensive that HostGator, but I like the service that I get.

I use my ISP's at home, which is fine. However if I'm away and use my phone or laptop, I am via a different connection so can't use it. These are the situations that I would like an alternative.

1and1 get my vote. Used them successfully for years.

I use www.verygoodemail.com

I run my own mail server. I have a low-power box (a Fit-PC) that sits in my study doing it all. I use VPOP3 running on Windows 7 and it's rock solid. Costs me £10 every two years for the domain. About £1 a month electricity.

I wanted the Ent version so I could have IMAP and TLS (and IPv6 if/when Plusnet ever get off their [censored] and provide it) so that's another £80 every couple of years. The Home version is cheaper (I thought it was now free but I appear to be wrong).

Edited by Andrue (Tue 26-Apr-16 18:34:08)

I use www.verygoodemail.com

Catchy name, I wonder how they came up with that ?

Better than reversing his surname

If you are using all your domains along with email accounts for all of them and it is all hosted on the single server/host then they will end up possibly getting flagged as mass emailing and then blocked.

We own a Rack Server located in a datacentre and have several domains owned by different people on our server that we provide webspace and an email service for.

This worked great for a while and then started to get flagged and blocked and was given a 5xx error code stating we have been flagged as mass emailing.
We was like scratching our heads for a while thinking we are not mass emailing nothing, but in a way we are, if a server is hosting more than 1 mail service and is sending emails from each of those, its classed as mass emailing, even if its only 1 email a week per domain.

What we had to do is set up some SPF (Sender Policy Framework) domain records to say that the IP of the server is allowed to send emails for X domains.
Once that's set up correctly it all starts to work again.

Try reading this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

Hope that helps.

*** changes underlined ***

Paul

Edited by PaulKirby (Wed 27-Apr-16 03:06:49)

<waves>

Iain