Mail stuck in GoDaddy Mail Queue
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients
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.