Mail stuck in GoDaddy Mail Queue
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients
TLDR: Moved critical email off GoDaddy. If you have AlmaLinux8 server, there might be a known issue you are facing. Skip to bottom to read that part.
Two weeks ago, I realized that all of my outgoing email was bouncing, and had been for several days. I had been out of office, and had not realized this. I have a Gen4 Managed VPS with GoDaddy. I had moved away from GoDaddy last year, but both VPS companies I tried out gave me blacklisted mail servers. As this was the problem I was trying to avoid with GoDaddy, I ended up moving back.
But here we are again dealing with email issues. It is worth noting that GoDaddy has been getting out of the email business for some time. In fact this time they made it clear, if you want functioning email… don’t use us.
Regarding our service uptime, we do not guarantee email deliverability through our services or our servers. If email is business-critical, it is recommended that you use dedicated email systems designed for sending email. Our servers are not email servers, they’re web servers with the ability to send out simple mail. They lack the bells and whistles that re required for more resilient email sending and receiving.
GoDaddy Support
While I’m happy to use another SMTP server, GoDaddy requires you to use their Godaddy relay dedserver.secureserver.net
So in effect they are saying “don’t use our VPS”. So if you are running into this issue, after this is done, I highly recommend finding a new hosting service.
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue
I opened up WHM and checked out the mail queue. There were indeed mail backed up.
I first tried to manually resend one of the messages, however it would connect to the mail relay, login, and then hang while sending data. Tested this several times with same result.
Wait times for GoDaddy were 50+ minutes, so I continued to try and solve independently while I waited. I found several good articles dealing with this situation. While they did not solve my issue, they are a good place to start. Cpanel website talks about adjusting your smarthost. Serverfault describes how to set up and modify your exim4 config file to work with GoDaddy’s mail relay. Seo-Goldhost has a similar article with a simple fix for these time out errors. I also attempted to use one of the other relay servers GoDaddy has for east coast or overseas.
Invalid value dedrelay.secureserver.net for smarthost_routelist. This setting will not be updated.
All of these failed to work for me. So after jumping through the usual hoops, I was able to speak with a sever support rep at GoDaddy. She clearly knew her shit and understood the steps I had taken. It really pains me that getting support staff like this is so difficult. Back in the day, this type of customer support was pretty much the norm at GoDaddy. Turns out this is a “Known Issue” with several tickets open. I’ll spare you the next few days of back and forth, but basically I had no outgoing email for 4-5 days.
We understand your frustration, however, we cannot disclose internal company information to customers
I tried to find out what the actual issue was, hoping that if It occurred in the future I would have a better understanding, so as to possibly find an alternative option while waiting for it to be fixed. Basically I was told “no” . I get why this is the case, but it’s frustrating. Over the last 10 years support for technical services ( phone, internet ) seems like it has gone over a cliff. Oh well, old man rant.
For some reason I’m surprised.. but it’s broken again today. With some difficulty I was able to find my ticket, and attempted to reactivate it. Pretty sure it is going to be a few days without email. Time to actually move this server this time.
Edit: Surprise response from GoDaddy. They have a temporary fix, and I was given a call back number that someone answered quickly and addressed the issue.
Edit2: Fucking hell I hate them sometimes
UPDATE: They started blocking some outgoing email. Last straw. Using Zoho now for anything critical. I think GoDaddy’s email service is strictly for marketing/spamming now. Hope all their servers get blocked. Pretty bitter about this. I hate when a company I rely on goes from good to shit.
UPDATE: October 29 2023
When dealing with VPS issues, do not call regular godaddy support. There is a 480- number that is provided on the server management page of the godaddy website. You get there from here
I am again experiencing this issue. After I moved my primary email accounts, I did leave some forwarding addresses on my VPS – I’m using to having infinite email aliases, and use them to sort many things. Eg, [email protected] is the address I use for dealing with verizon. So I am using GoDaddy still to handle my forwards for non-critical accounts. Also for “Friends and Family” websites that I host.
As a result there are multiple issues that I am facing that lead to Frozen and Queued status for outgoing email.
1) Their internal spam tools are blocking my outgoing email.
GoDaddy has a ‘machine-learning’ program that checks for outgoing spam. If you call the VPS support number, they have an internal proprietary tool they use to look at this. They can see errors such as “Bad Subject” “Bad Domain” “Spam like content”.
Well… If you have a forward set up, and that email receives spam-you forward it to the new account and get flagged as a spammer. They said my account was showing tons of “Bad Subject” “Spam like content” errors.
I am not clear what happens to those email, if they are discarded, sit in queue for re-delivery or what. At least some of these ( super obvious spam ) became “Frozen” in the queue. I believe you get a generic “your email could not be delivered, will be retried” message and then after a few days you get “cannot be delivered”, which stack up in the queue.
If you receive false flags, you can self-report these email here: checkspam.godaddy.com
2) AlmaLinux 8 baud rate issue
I was informed there is a known issue, and a directive came down that it was necessary to slightly reduce the baud rate. The example was 1500 to 1480. This makes no sense to me, I am just passing this information along. Support indicated that this had not been done on my box.
I do not know if these steps will resolve the core issue of mail getting stuck in the Queue. By fixing #1, I never find out if #2 is an issue.