Webhostinghub denies "blacklisting" status - 192.145.238.21

Asked by:
stephanie / 5 Points
Time:
2014-07-22 9:35 pm EST
Category:
Email
Hits:
388
Has this happened to anybody else?
Absolutely POOR Customer Service at Webhostinghub.com!
I have spoken or communicated with 7 different technical support team members. All 7 have given me different causes for the email problem and different solutions. This has gone on for more than one week! When we email a client who utilizes a "blacklist" service our emails bounce back with this message:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
JDoe@blank.com
retry timeout exceeded
------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

I have tried repeatedly to get help. I can't post the (7) responses I received from (7) different Technical Support team members because of size limitation on this post apparently.

But after being told by Brian M and Ab that IP's were blacklisted and Ab's solution not working, I contact support again this morning and get this -

Web Hosting Hub Support (support@webhostinghub.com)
11:48 AM
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us.
I am sorry to see that your issue continues for you. We will be happy to continue to assist you. As stated previously, all indications of this issue is that the recipient domain mail server is blocking email from our server. I have run further tests, attempting to send a simple ping test to the recipient mail server. The test failed. The recipient mail server is blocking the IP address of your server. It is not listed in our firewall and all connections to/from the mail IP is allowed. The issue lies with the recipient of your email. We cannot force them to remove our IP address. We cannot ask them to remove the server IP address. Your mail IP is not on any known blacklisting service.
I suggest contacting your mail recipient to have them whitelist your mail IP address for it seems they are indeed the only ones blocking it.
The mail IP address of your server is 192.145.238.21
Please let us know if you have any further questions; we are more than happy to help. By the way, our new support center features hundreds of great new articles, improved search results and a new community driven Question and Answer section! Our new support center is located at webhostinghub.com/support.
Best Regards,
Matthew G.

Not on any known blacklisting service? Really?
http://www.unifiedemail.net/Tools/RBLCheck/Default.aspx
Report Summary - We checked your IP address [192.145.238.21] 'whub28.webhostinghub.com' against 230 RBL providers in 32.5 seconds.
You are currently listed in 1 RBL Zone(s). You should click on the link of the RBL provider for removal criteria.
Provider Name DNS RBL Zone Response Response Time
V4BL-DDNSBL ip.v4bl.org 127.0.0.2 63 ms

And:
http://www.blacklistalert.org/
DNS-Status of 192.145.238.21 :
Reverse DNS (PTR) exists and claims to be: whub28.webhostinghub.com.
Forward DNS for whub28.webhostinghub.com is: 205.134.241.32.
WARNING: Forward-DNS does NOT match Reverse-DNS. DNS is INCONSISTENT.
Please request your Admin or Provider to fix this.

It is as if the support staff doesn't read the history of your submitted ticket or do they believe each previous support tech was wrong? I conclude that webhostinghub.com isn't intended for serious businesses that MUST communicate with their clients via email. At this point, I'm looking to a new web and email hosting provider. I wish somebody had warned me.

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Webhostinghub.com Support responses to my emails

1. Thu 7/17/2014 9:39 PM
Hello Stephanie,
Thank you for contacting us.
I am very sorry you are having this issue. I am more than happy to help. This bounce back is due to the number of emails that have failed to the domain blank.com. This is not necessarily from your account, but since you are on a shared hosting their may have been many people sending to that domain. This is a temporary block that will be lifted, and the server will deliver your email. It has not permanently failed.
Please let us know if you have any further questions; we are more than happy to help.
Best Regards,
Larry W
My response to #1. - it wasn't temporary, we haven't been able to email them for a week and the emails we did send weren't eventually delivered.

2. Fri 7/18/2014 12:33 PM
Hello Stephanie ,
Thanks for contacting us.
I'd be happy to assist you. This is being queued by blank.com. I have replicated this issue on a different server and I do see that it is being queued for delivery by their servers. It is leaving our servers. The best thing to do is to contact the person you are sending to and let them know that this is occurring because they will have to resolve this. Are you getting other bounceback emails other than from blank.com? If you are please send us one so we can further investigate.
Please let us know if you have any further questions; we are more than happy to help.
Best Regards,
Alicia H

My response to #2 - the client whitelisted our domain. They could not see emails ever hitting their server.

3. Fri 7/18/2014 2:34 PM
Hello Stephanie, thank you for contacting us!
I would like to show you a tool that will help you interpret bouncebacks with us. http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/tools/bounce-back-parser
That will give you the info you need. in this case it says : JDoe@blank.com retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period.
As that is the case, are you by chance using spam assassin and box trapper? If you are there may be a quick fix. Change spam assassin to auto delete spam mail. Otherwise, it will send to box trapper and then box trapper will keep sending emails and reporting timeout errors.
If you are not using Box trapper, please let us know! I hope this helps!
Please let us know if you have any further questions; we are more than happy to help.
Best regards,
Brett T.

My response to #3 - we aren't using box trapper.

4. Fri 7/18/2014 4:03 PM
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us. From the Bounce Back we are able to deduct why you haven't been able to email your client at JDoe@blank.com. You may find it useful to enable your Domain Keys for your emails. This will help authenticate your emails for recipients and eliminated bounce backs.
Please let us know if you have any further questions; we are more than happy to help.
Thank you very much!!
Best regards,
Shain J

My response to #4 - I made these changes, but still couldn't email.

5. EMAIL: stephanie@------------------------.com
QUESTION:
We cannot email a client. This issue has gone on for more than a week. It is not acceptable for a business to not be able to email their client. The support team has given me about 4 different "solutions," none of which have corrected the problem and the solutions indicate that the support team is not in agreement on the cause of the problem.
Emailing the"manager" has proven pointless. I have basically been abandoned, expected to accept this problem. It appears to me that the problem is that webhostinghub is on a blacklist because they host spam clients and legitimate clients are being penalized by blacklists.
[Brian M] Hello Stephanie, my name is Brian M, thanks for contacting us!
[Stephanie Tidwell] My support ticket number is 100-192222.
[Brian M] ok Please hold 5 - 10 minutes while I look into this for you.
[Brian M] Stephanie, thank you for waiting. which email address is having this
issue? I am going to run a live feed of the logs while you then send a test message
to the client
[Stephanie ] multipe emails are having this issue
[Stephanie ] ex1@-----------------------.com
[Stephanie ] ex2@-----------------------.com
[Stephanie ] ex3@-----------------------.com
[Brian M] Stephanie, can you send a message to the client in question now
[Stephanie ]yes
[Stephanie ] just clicked send
[Stephanie ] and received the bounce back again
[Brian M] ok .Please hold 5 - 10 minutes while I look into this for you.
[Stephanie ] thank you Brian
[Brian M] Stephanie, I have escalated this issue up to my higher tier i did find that your cpanel ip address was blacklisted, I am making sure that delisting that will resolve the issue
[Stephanie] you mean webhostinghub's ip address which we share with thousands of other webhostinghub clients, correct? What is the likelihood that the IP will be blacklisted again in the future?
[Brian M] Well its possible it could get blacklisted again because as you mentioend you are on a shared hosting account. if you would like you can request to be moved to a different server but there are no guarentees that the mail server IP address isn't going to get blacklisted again, we strive to make sure spam isn't sent from the server but attacks can happen and all it takes is one compromised email address to get the IP address blacklisted
[Stephanie ] Would a dedicated IP address (not dedicated
hosting) resolve the issue or is blacklisting based on the smtp?
[Brian M] I have requested the IP address be delisted but you may also want to
contact the client and have them whitelist you domain name in the spam filters
[Brian M] blacklisting is based on SMTP ip address. its possible that the
dedicated IP address may help with this though as it would set your SPF and DKIM records to a non shared ip address
[Stephanie ] so you aren't aware of any clients that have attempted the dedicated IP and the results of doing so?
[Brian M] Personally no, I am not I havent seen someone get the dedicated IP
address to prevent blacklistings.
[Stephanie ] When should we expect delisting to take place?
[Brian M] Well it will take up to 24 hours to be delisted per the blacklisting
company
[Stephanie ] Am I correct that it could be either our client or their ISP that is blocking based on the blacklist? Aren't their dozens of blacklist companies and how do we know which one or does it matter?
[Brian M] it could very well be the RBL that your client is using on there servers which is a list of blacklisters to check to see if an email is spam. if they whitelist your domain you shouldn't get blacklisted when sending to them.
[Brian M] Do you have any other questions that I can help you with?
[Stephanie ] ok, thank you. Is there somebody you could check with regarding the likelihood that a dedicated IP would help? I don't need an answer now, but if somebody could email me, that would be great.
[Brian M] well if you submit a ticket we can then look into it and send you an email
[Brian M] here is how to submit a ticket http://www.webhostinghub.com/help/learn/website/getting-started-guides/howto-
submit-a-ticket-and-check-on-the-status#submit-pdesk-ticket
[Brian M] Is there anything else I can assist you with at this time?
[Stephanie ] No, thank you for providing a definitive cause for this issue even though it isn't good news.

My response to #5 - this is the one person who I believe got it right!

6. Monday 07/21/2014 Afternoon
Phone Call from Ab at InMotion???
Not sure what prompted his call, but he informs me that Brian M. was incorrect and that the mail server is not on a blacklist. It is the actual server that is on a blacklist. He also said that he could email the client without a problem. He had me email client. It bounced back. He then made changes to the spf record by adding the mail server IP 192.145.238.21. He said it would take a couple of hours to update and we would be able to email the client.

My response to #6 - the following morning, still unable to email client.

And webhostinghub.com's response #7 is in original post, which kinda leaves me to figure it out.

stephanie
5 Points
2014-07-22 09:45 pm EST

ANSWERS

0

arnelc
Staff
17,314 Points
2014-07-22 10:26 pm EST
Hello Stephanie,

Apologies with the frustration in sending email to this particular person. I investigated all of the notes on the account and tickets to see what was happening. I also re-visited all of the errors logged into the mail log when sending to emailrecipient@. I asked a systems person about this as well in order to verify my findings. The error message we're seeing in the logs looks like this:

"retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period"

This very atypical of greylisted emails - as opposed to blacklisting. Also, after generating the error, we're seeing that the recipient's email server is NOT communicating as is an industry standard to let email administrators know that there is a problem. This is the reason you kept getting the same answers from the technical support people who have responded to you. If an email server is blacklisted, we'll see a bounce with an error message (indicating it's blocked), a contact point, and often a URL for who we can contact in order for the server to be de-listed.

The server for the contact that you are sending is basically not setup correctly, or something's happening that they are not sending out that information or refuse to do so. It is for this reason, that we state "the recipient's mail administrator must take action" in order to correct this issue. We have no way to correct this. We need some contact point. I understand that you used Blacklistalert.org to find a blacklisting, but that doesn't mean that this is the service that your mail recipient's email server is using. We need some type of identification as to WHO is blocking the emails from this server. There are unfortunately MANY services out there and in some cases they are not reputable - which is why we rely on industry standard responses between the servers to let us know when there is a problem. At the same time we get an alert of that nature, we are able to identify who it is, who needs to contact to take action and if there is a specific problem.

The best way to approach this issue at this point is use another email service (if you can only communicate with this person by email) like Gmail to contact your mail recipient, and tell them the issue. They will need to contact their provider and inform of the problem.

Apologies again for the frustration! If you (or your mail recipient) can send us more information concerning the service blocking us and also a contact point to have us de-listed (which is standard, by the way), then we would be happy to take action.

Kindest regards,
Arnel C.


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Please remove my clients name from your post.
stephanie
5 Points

2014-07-22 11:31 pm EST
Stephanie,

It's been removed as requested.

Arnel
arnelc
17,314 Points
Staff
2014-07-23 12:02 am EST
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