I’ve been having a terrible problem sending emails from a godadddy shared-hosting (CPANEL) email account to any email account hosted by Network Solutions. I have spent hours on the phone with technical support from both godaddy and Network Solutions. I have two open tickets with Network Solutions for two different email addresses, and will open a third one for a third email address. As far as I can tell, email sent from that godaddy account reaches all other addresses just fine. There is a correct spf record for the godaddy account (gmail likes it). And some of the emails (the most important ones) even have DKIM signatures. Gmail doesn’t quite like the DKIM signatures, but accepts the mail. And the ones I’ve entered tickets for with netsol do not have DKIM signatures. But mail sent to the netsol addresses do not get delivered. They do not get delivered to Spam and they don’t bounce. They simply go to /dev/null.
I won’t rant about how incompetent the netsol response has been, but the first of the tickets was opened on August 3, and it’s still open, and the problem persists. The only visible action on their part that I have seen is that they sent an email to my netsol account with a spoofed sender address of the godaddy account. But I could see in the headers that it originated from a netsol server, so that’s why it got through.
On the other hand, godaddy technical support has been extremely helpful, and I eventually managed to sweet talk the support agents out of the relevant entries from their outgoing server logs. The agent I spoke with about the third netsol address was not willing to send the actual server log entries, but he confirmed to me that they were equivalent to what I had been given for the first two, which were essentially the same.
So here is (a highly-sanitized version of) the server interaction, where 1.2.3.4 is the IP address of the godaddy MTA, and 5.6.7.8 is the IP address of the netsol MTA.
20210812 09:29:10.177 core sid="id1" id="id1id2"
ip="1.2.3.4" action="PERMERR" dstmta="5.6.7.8" age="61" code="553"
reason="553 5.3.0 198.71.225.36 Your message was rejected for possible spam/virus
content.Please ask your email provider to visit http://emailadmin.registeredsite.com
for resolution.rn" account="rsvp@godaddy-example.com""
fwd="0" bounce="false" mailfrom="rsvp@godaddy-example.com" fromdomain="godaddy-example.com"
recipient_list="rich@netsol-example.com" todomain="netsol-example.com"
subject="Sad news" subject_hash="f35ba6823f3a91025f0a495ed7de3b59" script="" script_ip=""
20210812 09:28:09.658 core sid="id1" id="id1id2"
ip="1.2.3.4" action="ACCEPT" reason="CLEAN" account="rsvp@godaddy-example.com"
fwd="0" mailfrom="rsvp@godaddy-example.com" fromdomain="godaddy-example.com"
recipient_list="rich@netsol-example.com" todomain="netsol-example.com" subject="Sad news"
subject_hash="f35ba6823f3a91025f0a495ed7de3b59" script="" script_ip=""
Can anybody explain why this would have resulted in the mail being thrown on the floor? Or how it can be that netsol would be unable to fix the problem within 10 days? I didn’t have these logs back on Aug 3, but I did give them the timestamp, Message-ID, and sending and receiving email addresses. Obviously the Subject line isn’t suspicious, and the message body was a single sentence saying that my grandfather passed away the previous day at 5 PM. Not likely to be recognized as spam. So my only conclusion was that it must be based on the IP address of of the godaddy server. I checked the IP address at mxtoolbox.com, and it was listed on a couple of blacklists, but no really bad ones (SORBS SPAM, which charges a fee for delisting, is ignored by godaddy, but they are proactive at staying off of Spamhaus). And I tried re-sending again after it was shown not to be on any blacklists, but it still went undelivered. I also checked it at http://emailadmin.registeredsite.com a few times, and it never showed as blocked. And of course they say that being blocked results in a bounce message.
Isn’t it kind of a requirement of SMTP that messages either get delivered or bounced? Does anybody know the specific meaning of the “nobounce” parameter in the 553 rejection entry? Is that saying that the netsol server will not issue a bounce, or is it telling the godaddy server not to bounce it? Should the godaddy server be issuing a bounce in response to the 553 from netsol anyway? Either way, it’s still a netsol problem for discarding the messages, but it would help me if godaddy sent a bounce in this situation.
