Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Go Daddy blocks links to EC2 ...

malone

Posts: 3
Registered: 4/24/08

Go Daddy blocks links to EC2
Posted: Aug 18, 2008 3:08 AM PDT

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It appears godaddy.com is preventing people from linking to websites hosted on EC2.

Since switching our website hosting to EC2 we've had trouble emailing some of our customers. A lot of them are using Go Daddy as their domain registrar, and are also using their mail server (smtp.secureserver.net). Any time we send an email to that mail server with a link to our EC2 website it is bounced with this message.

"554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content"

If I resend the exact same email, but without our website URL in the message body, it reaches the correct recipient.

It doesn't seem to make any difference where the email is sent from (I've tried my ISPs smtp server and other non-EC2 servers). It also makes no difference what the URL is, as long as it resolves to an EC2 IP address.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Is there any way to work round it, besides not including the URL?

I've email Go Daddy support about this issue as well.

malone

Posts: 3
Registered: 4/24/08

Re: Go Daddy blocks links to EC2
Posted: Aug 19, 2008 2:08 AM PDT

in response to: malone

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I got a reply back from Go Daddy. Apparently they use www.spamhaus.org to filter their email, and the whole EC2 address range is on their blacklists.

Is there anything that can be done about that?

Evan Coonrod

Posts: 5
Registered: 7/21/08

Re: Go Daddy blocks links to EC2
Posted: Aug 21, 2008 9:27 AM PDT

in response to: malone

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We ran into this same issue a few weeks ago- I whined about it on twitter until @godaddyguy got in touch. I whined at him on the phone directly, a week later they whitelisted us.

Their spam filter is set up to do a reverse dns lookup on any URLs that appear within the text of the email, and reject any mail which contains a URL pointing to an EC2 instance. They justify this because EC2 IPs appear on Spamhaus's Policy Block List here: http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/index.lasso Nobody I spoke to understood the difference between "containing a link to" and "originating from".

I'm sure that this has nothing to do with GoDaddy seeing itself as a competitor to AWS in the hosting arena and is purely based out of incompetence.

The guy I spoke to promised me that they were fully aware of how many hundreds of thousands of false positives this must cause in a day and they simply don't care. He told me that they were going to think about loosening this policy but obviously they haven't yet.

malone

Posts: 3
Registered: 4/24/08

Re: Go Daddy blocks links to EC2
Posted: Aug 27, 2008 3:51 AM PDT

in response to: Evan Coonrod

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I've been wrestling with their customer support as well. The Spamhaus Policy Block List is just a list of dynamic IP addresses, so it makes sense that the EC2 addresses are on that. But it doesn't make sense for Go Daddy to use that list for blocking URLs.

Even the Spamhaus FAQ states " PBL should not be used for URI-based blocking!" ( http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=Spamhaus%20PBL#187). I tried quoting that to the Go Daddy customer support, and they sent me a reply saying they were going to look into it. But after a few days I just got another email saying it was their policy and they weren't going to change it.

We're planning on changing our website to disallow people from signing up with an email address that is handled by Go Daddy. We'll show an error informing them of the broken mail server, and tell them to use a different address. It's not an ideal solution, but we don't have many options. Maybe once Go Daddys customers start complaining about it they'll reconsider their crazy policy.
Message was edited by: malone

Gandalf

Posts: 28
Registered: 2/9/08

Re: Go Daddy blocks links to EC2
Posted: Sep 25, 2009 5:14 AM PDT

in response to: malone

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Is there a way to send from EC2 using an off-site SMTP server where there is no EC2 information in the email header at all?

Shlomo Swidler

Posts: 2,105
Registered: 7/10/08

Re: Go Daddy blocks links to EC2
Posted: Sep 25, 2009 5:35 AM PDT

in response to: Gandalf

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Sure. For low-volume email Google Apps for Domains works great.

Otherwise, search these forums for "authsmtp" and you'll find a number of suggested third-party SMTP providers.

diamano

Posts: 1
Registered: 9/30/09

Re: Go Daddy blocks links to EC2
Posted: Jan 29, 2010 2:39 PM PST

in response to: Shlomo Swidler

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its funny, the spamhaus bl doesnt list the ec2 ip addresses. So why would it be blocking them? Has anyone found a way around this yet, this thread was started 2 years ago so im hopeful that now something has improved, specifically for smtp recognition.