Ongoing HostGator Email

I have been hosting (reseller account) with HostGator for about 1-2 years now. While I have had no problems with any of my own personal domains, some of my clients for whom I provide hosting are reporting email problems.

One client is a company that hosts about 15 email addresses on the server. They have complained that they don't receive all their emails. People tell them how they sent them a message, yet they never received it. The problem isn't consistent. Also, not all messages they send are being received. After much fussing with this, and looking into every possible solution, we came to learn this scenario:

- Someuser@hotmail.com sends an email to johndoe@mycompany.com

- Hotmail looks for an MX record for mycompany.com and finds it’s IP to be 10.10.10.1

- The Hotmail server contacts 10.10.10.1 and delivers the message

- John Doe receives the email fine

- John Doe then replies to the email back to someuser@hotmail.com

- Mail server at mycompany.com looks for an MX record for hotmail.com, finds the IP, and delivers the message to it

- Hotmail, because it does spam checking, uses reverse lookups as one of it’s spam checks. It takes the IP that sent it the message, 10.10.10.1, and looks for a PTR record. It finds one and it maches ‘astra.websitewelcome.com’ instead of ‘mycompany.com’. As a result, the spam check fails and the message is dropped

- Some User never receives John Doe’s response

I asked HostGator about this.

HostGators response:
"Unfortunately that IP a ddress is a shared IP address and so you will run into issues such as this, however, we have quite a number of other accounts that use this sort of setup without any issue and are able to send to Hotmail. *Another issue would be that ultimately the IP address that is sending a the message to them would not be from the server that you are on, but on one of our gateway systems, however, this should be overcome with the SPF record that you have in place."

Since then, another one of my clients (this time a Hotel that needs to receive it's reservation requests) is beginning to report the same problem. Some (not all) emails just don't make it to the inbox. Customers call and report that they had sent an email; but said email was never received in the first place.

I have again consulted with HostGator who have not been able to help because they don't see any of said emails on server, so what can they do? Nothing, I guess.

So what can I do about this. Do I need to switch to another host? Do you know of any hosts with whom I can be sure not to have this problem?

In looking at new webhosts, I have begun to consider VPS options. However, I am afraid that if I get a VPS server I will have to configure all of these MX Records, PTR Records, SPF records, and so on. I don't want to have to deal with all of these technical details. I am a website developer who sometimes provides hosting. I don't have time to learn the ins and outs of hosting and email server configuration.