Godaddy 1000 Emails SMTP Relay Limit: According To Jim Warholic
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Godaddy 1000 Emails SMTP Relay Limit
Sorry Godaddy, the last straw for virtual dedicated server with a Plesk Control panel.
About six months ago I started receiving the following email message.
I followed all the procedures per Godaddy recommendations for preventing unauthorized use of my email servers from sending spam from others. Made sure my email relays were closed. Made sure I did not have any catchall email accounts. This however did not stop the problem and the incoming messages from Godaddy. I sent an email to Godaddy, but was surprised to find out that this was going to be a $75.00 charge for trouble shooting the problem, with no guarantee that it would be fixed. Not good enough for me. After doing a search online, I saw that others were experiencing the same exact problem related to Godaddy virtual dedicated hosting. So, sorry Godaddy, love your domain name registration, but virtual dedicated hosting with Plesk control panel leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, I had other complaints with the Plesk control panel. Future reference, go with a Cpanel over Plesk. Cpanel control panel offers a lot more options to make your web life a lot easier from a webmaster point of view.
So, I moved on to a new hosting company. That will be a future article.
By-the-way, my suspicion of the problem with the Godaddy Virtual Dedicated server account is to do with something called email dictionary attacks. What spammers are doing is inundating in a matter of seconds, a dictionary attack to try to find other emails on a particular domain name. I believe they are using a form gateway to get into the server, however briefly, and launch the dictionary attack. This causes the SMTP gateway to get flagged for the Godaddy account. At that point, you have no recourse than to wait it out till midnight for Godaddy to automatically reset the SMTP email relay gateway, so you can then send and receive emails.
About six months ago I started receiving the following email message.
*****************
YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DAILY SMTP RELAY LIMIT
*****************
Dear James,
You have reached your current SMTP relay limit of 1000 per day on the following hosting account:
Hosting Services
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Your hosting server will be unable to send email until the daily SMTP relay limit is reset. The daily SMTP relay limit is reset on all accounts at midnight MST.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you need to send more than 1000 emails per day from your hosting server, you can request an increase through Customer Support. However, increase requests must be justified and must not violate our anti-spam policy.
If you have any questions, please contact Customer Support:
+ Online Support: https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/
support.asp?prog_id=GoDaddy&isc=gdbb727
+ Email: support@godaddy.com
+ Phone: (480) 505-8877
Thanks again for being a GoDaddy.com Hosting customer.
Sincerely,
GoDaddy.com
I followed all the procedures per Godaddy recommendations for preventing unauthorized use of my email servers from sending spam from others. Made sure my email relays were closed. Made sure I did not have any catchall email accounts. This however did not stop the problem and the incoming messages from Godaddy. I sent an email to Godaddy, but was surprised to find out that this was going to be a $75.00 charge for trouble shooting the problem, with no guarantee that it would be fixed. Not good enough for me. After doing a search online, I saw that others were experiencing the same exact problem related to Godaddy virtual dedicated hosting. So, sorry Godaddy, love your domain name registration, but virtual dedicated hosting with Plesk control panel leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, I had other complaints with the Plesk control panel. Future reference, go with a Cpanel over Plesk. Cpanel control panel offers a lot more options to make your web life a lot easier from a webmaster point of view.
So, I moved on to a new hosting company. That will be a future article.
By-the-way, my suspicion of the problem with the Godaddy Virtual Dedicated server account is to do with something called email dictionary attacks. What spammers are doing is inundating in a matter of seconds, a dictionary attack to try to find other emails on a particular domain name. I believe they are using a form gateway to get into the server, however briefly, and launch the dictionary attack. This causes the SMTP gateway to get flagged for the Godaddy account. At that point, you have no recourse than to wait it out till midnight for Godaddy to automatically reset the SMTP email relay gateway, so you can then send and receive emails.
posted by Jim Warholic at 4:12 PM
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7 Comments:
Same problem there are somethinkg going wrong by godaddy site..
I called GoDaddy today to find out more about the "virtual dedicated server" offering. They said that the SMTP limit is only for OUTBOUND email.
There is no limit to the number of incoming SMTP connections - so spammers can accost your domains all they want without you exceeding any limitations. When the spammer connects to GoDaddy's relay server and tries to guess an email for you, it does not acount against your limits.
The only thing that counts is when YOUR virtual server makes an OUTBOUND connection to GoDaddy's relay server. If you try to make more than 1,000 connections in a day, then you get cut off until midnight.
So, unless GoDaddy is lying to me, it sounds like your difficulty is that you are indeed running an open relay server or something.
(And since you don't have the technical expertise to diagnose and fix it yourself, they want to bill you for them to login to your machine and reconfigure it for you. )
If that's not what's going on, it would be extremely interesting to know what the real deal is there.
I can assure you that I had been through all the email settings of all the sites and did not have any open relays.
However, there is a good possibility of a forwarded email address is like having the SMTP relay limit go against the outbound email count with a forward. This is just conjecture on my part. I did in fact have some email addresses with forwards, with no email accounts specific for some of the forwards on the server. The emails would go straight through to the forward and not go to an email box on the virtual server. So, it is possible that these were going against me for the outbound count also.
Once again, I was not willing to pay $75.00 to get an answer from Godaddy that either they could not figure the problem out, or an answer that said the forwards were the problem. Nor was Godaddy willing to answer any questions at all, without paying the $75.00 in the first place. OK, so the bottom-line decision, I was not willing to relinquish the email forwards, not willing to pay for the customer service, so I switched hosting providers.
FYI to Everyone
I also made sure of the following was not bouncing back emails to to others for any of the email accounts.
This is from Godaddy Help
There is a daily limit of 1,000 outbound emails from your dedicated/virtual dedicated server. There are several other reasons besides "standard email" that can cause you to reach this daily restriction. The following are a few things you can check:
Verify That Your Domain Name is Not Sending Out Bouncebacks.
The default Plesk setting is to bounce email sent to non-existent users. This means that if your domain is coolexample.com, and someone sends an email to a non-existent user (ex: johndoe@coolexample.com), it is defaulted to send a message back saying "This user does not exist". If your domain receives a lot of incoming mail to non-existent users, the daily limit can be hit in no time.
probably was a mail form script being attacked.
That's a possibility. I was using a form mail at the time. Are there any things that can be done to stop the attacks or reduce the impact on the email server of the mail form script attacks?
I would say that your best way of stopping the form mail attacks is to use Captcha (i.e. the same type of post verification that is used to post comments here)
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