The Internet Home Business Magazine for Moms & Dads

I am Now Invalid and I Can’t Get Up!

 

Lately I have had a problem. It’s getting worse.

Everywhere I go these days, I can’t seem to use my email address anymore.

You see, my domain name is emomsatHOME.COM. Suddenly in the last two weeks, something has happened so that if I try to leave a comment, make a purchase, or fill out an online form, I’m getting error messages telling me that my email address is INVALID.

What’s so wrong with Home.com?!This could be the biggest pain in my a$$ I have ever encountered. I’m actually quite nervous about it. I think it is related to the fact that home.com is an obsolete ISP. But the error is happening across the board on very unrelated websites.

But it also explains why nearly all of my emails - even personal emails to friends - are landing in people’s spam folders.

How the HECK do you fix something like this? Is it even centrally regulated? Am I really on some kind of blacklist? Why else would I not be able to comment on blogs, nor make a swanky bloggy t-shirt purchase because I can’t even register on their site with my email address?!

Does anyone know anything about this at all?! Help! :)

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  • Discussion

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    Comments

    1.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 1:25 pm, Roberto Alamos said:

    Wendy, you recently switched to a dedicated server. If you run your own mail server there (and if you don’t have anybody properly administering it) there are chances that spammers have found you and are misusing your smtp server, sending spam (obviously :P). Therefore you are blacklisted. I cannot be sure but I believe your problem has nothing to do with home.com :P

    Someway you will have to check if your smtp server is open to relay, because if it is, that’s the reason ;).

    2.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 1:40 pm, Mike Maddaloni said:

    Hi Wendy - From a Web development standpoint, most online forms do not validate actual text in an email address, and if they do any validating it is to ensure than an email address is in the proper format, like x@y.com.

    You should check with your hosting company or Internet provider on this, and Roberto’s advice is a good path to take.

    Good luck!

    mp/m

    3.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 2:18 pm, Matt said:

    Could be that people are blacklisting home.com, but are just doing a “contains home.com” instead of the more precises “is home.com”.

    Time for a new name, maybe? :P

    4.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 2:30 pm, homemom3 said:

    akkkk. I’ll check my spam box now that you said that too. Hope you get this fixed, wish I could help ya out.

    5.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 3:14 pm, Roberto Alamos said:

    After you fix this problem consider moving your email to a managed email service. In my opinion Gmail For Your Domain really r0x and the best of all is that it’s free, it comes with a lot of storage space, it’s easy to administer and you can rely on google’s ability to keep your emails secure no matter what (yeah nobody is 100% flawless but google is not exactly bad doing that).

    I believe you are a thunderbird user. Yes thunderbird is great but GmFYD is even better ;)

    6.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 4:00 pm, swirlingnotions said:

    This is totally off-topic, but I wanted to tell you how much I’m enjoying your e-course. I’ve done a lot of research and reading on building my blog so I ‘knew’ a lot, but to have your e-mails each day organizing me into ‘doing’ something about it is making it all feel much more manageable and is halping a lot. Thanks Wendy!

    And good luck with the e-mail gunk . . . ;-)

    Cheers,
    Lia

    7.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 4:47 pm, shaz said:

    good luck! just wanted to agree with Roberto - gmail is pretty nice! The only thing I wonder is if there is a way to access all of my accounts from one interface (like in outlook) instead of having each one as a separate account - any ideas Roberto? :)

    thanks.

    8.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 5:40 pm, Roberto Alamos said:

    Yup shaz, choose one account as your primary email, and any other account must forward every email to that primary account. Then you go to your primary gmail account’s settings > Accounts > “Add another email address” and follow the instructions ;)

    Good luck!

    9.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 8:44 pm, Alpesh Nakar said:

    Wendy,
    There is a way to handle this. I have just checked some spam black lists and your server ip does not appear on that. That is good news!

    Secondly, use Google Apps for your Domain. Within GAFYD, you can setup another domain and aliases. If you have another domain -> use that domain to alias. It’s simple. If you need a hand with this, please contact me.

    With alias setup you can be wendy@xyz.com and all your emails will come to emomsathome mail box.

    It’s like merging organisations and having one mailbox with different internet facing addresses.

    10.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 9:19 pm, JoLynn Braley said:

    So do you still receive email Wendy? I was about to email you so I hope that it would get through! :)

    I didn’t have any suggestions for you on this issue but I sure have learned a lot from the comments above, thanks everyone, and good luck with getting this straightened out Wendy! Please let us know which solution works for you. :)

    11.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 10:01 pm, Suzie Cheel said:

    I Feel for you Wendy and I Love the swanky Technorati hottie:)

    Just a suggestion why not get a gmail account, I find it good for most things where I leave my address on the web, good at catching spam I find and Dawud’s post on email was very helpful

    12.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 10:12 pm, JoLynn Braley said:

    I agree Suzie, those Technorati hottie t-shirts are especially cute…I’d get the green one! :)

    13.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 10:34 pm, Roberto Alamos said:

    @Alpesh: emomsathome.com’s mail server IS listed on some spam black lists :/

    That’s very annoying. Once I inherited a blacklisted server and the only way I could fix its owner email problems was switching to google apps.

    14.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 10:47 pm, Wendy Piersall said:

    Hey Thanks for the great info everyone! Yes, I am quite happy with Thunderbird - the problem doesn’t seem to be affecting my inbound emails - just my outbound emails.

    Hey Roberto - where did you find my domain on a blacklist? I have called both my bulk email provider and my hosting company about this problem and neither seemed to have any answers. :(

    15.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 10:51 pm, Alpesh Nakar said:

    @Roberto

    Thats interesting. I did check 2 and didn’t find. Which ones did you find on?

    16.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 11:12 pm, Dennis Bjørn Petersen said:

    I checked to see if you are blacklisted using this tool: http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx?IP=66.7.206.142

    It already has the IP-address for your domain name inserted.

    You weren’t on any of the 116 blacklists.

    17.
    On August 15th, 2007 at 11:14 pm, Dennis Bjørn Petersen said:

    Update: Just to make sure I checked those that timed out too and you weren’t on any of those lists either.

    http://www.emailtools.co.uk/tools/blacklistcheck.htm

    18.
    On August 16th, 2007 at 12:44 am, Jenni said:

    I don’t have any advice… just wanted to say, “I feel your pain!” - I’m dealing with emails not being delivered too! Learning a ton here about it though - thanks for sharing your issue with this so we can all learn.

    19.
    On August 16th, 2007 at 8:53 am, Ariane Benefit, Neat & Simple Living said:

    Wendy, that is sooo strange! I feel for you! I’m learning so much from the comments here! I’m going to check if I’m blacklisted and also look into “gmail for your domain” Thanks to all of you for sharing such a wealth of tech knowledge!

    20.
    On August 16th, 2007 at 8:56 pm, Angie Hartford said:

    Sometimes this has happened when I’m using all-caps online to save time (not to shout, LOL). When I switch to lowercase, my information is often accepted.

    Hope this helps!

    21.
    On August 17th, 2007 at 7:10 am, Dawud Miracle said:

    Just my two cents…Roberto gave you great advice. I’d love to know how you end up resolving this…

    22.
    On August 17th, 2007 at 8:34 am, next STEPH said:

    Wendy,
    Yeah, it amazing. I had also gotten error messages when filling out forms from certain websites because of my last name. It gotten to the point where I thought about changing my last name to my grandmother’s name. Instead, I persisted and made a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, and all was cleared. I hope it works out.

    23.
    On August 17th, 2007 at 8:57 am, derek said:

    My first thought was along the lines of over-aggressive spam filters that were simply picking out the *home.com and marking the email as spam.

    There seem to be various answers as to whether you are blacklisted or not, hopefully your host can help you resolve that issue.



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