Problems with hostname.

[Spork Schivago]

Ah yep, much the same things that upset me about GoDaddy also. Symlink Race protection at the kernel level, impossible on their VPS's which sucks. They let you rename your hostname from ip-XXX-XXX-XX-XX.ip.secureserver.net to your own FQDN but then a reverse lookup points to the secureserver name instead of the custom name you put in.. I really don't know why that wouldn't change to the new hostname I set in their server admin panel but, alas, nothing I can do about it I guess. Thanks for getting back to me...

I believe I know why they prevent users from setting up reverse DNS. I think it has something to do with their mail relay. They try to prevent people from sending spam, which is good, but I feel they go about it the wrong way. All mail goes through their relay and there's a limit to how many e-mails you can send a day. It all goes through the secureserver.net stuff.

If you ever move from GoDaddy to some place Linode, if you use cPanel / WHM to backup your installation configuration files, when you restore it on the new server, your mail won't work because of this. You have to go into Exim's configuration and remove the GoDaddy stuff. If you do this on the actual GoDaddy servers, they say you'll get in lots of trouble for trying to bypass their anti-spam stuff.

 

[ItsMattSon]

Hi Spork,

Agree 100%. Those are my findings also. 5000 relays a day permitted from my VPS via secureserver.net mail relay and GoDaddy server support confirmed with me yesterday that changing the PTR record is not possible by myself and not possible by them because they are unwilling. They said that was spam-related and the only way I'd be able to was to own my own IP, which would mean running my own web server out of my home haha.

They mentioned also that the rDNS lookup shouldn't affect mail *too* much and to focus on DKIM, SPF and DMARC records to improve the mail score. However, on that note, the secureserver mail relay is on 4 spam blacklists of 40, haha. Must be a constant battle for GoDaddy trying to stay off of them!

 

[Spork Schivago]

A little off topic here, but I wonder how the mail servers work. I have one installed on my server. When I log into webmail and I go to send an e-mail to [email protected], for example, does my mail server connect directly to google's mail servers, or does it connect to a bunch of mail servers in between and kinda gets forwarded along the way until it reaches gmail? When I run traceroute on gmail.com, I see a bunch of hops that we have to go through before we reach gmail.com. If the mail has to go through that as well, maybe GoDaddy can check just the mail before it leaves without using a relay and see if it's likely spam, using something like spamassassin. If a person sends enough that register as spam, maybe temporarily shut down their ability to send mail until it's further investigated. I think in the end though, they're never going to change it.

If you really want fully control of your VPS, the only true way to gain it is to switch hosting providers.