Chris Risner . Com

For the past 3 days, I’ve been in Las Vegas for the Microsoft Mix10 conference.  So far it has been an incredible experience.  Coming into the conference, everyone knew that they were going to be mentioning Windows Phone 7.  The first keynote ended up focusing almost entirely on it.  The big things from the first  and part of the second day regarding the Windows Phone 7 are:

• Developing for the Windows Phone 7 is going to be free.  The current development tools are already available here.
• The Windows Phone 7 will run a subset of Silverlight 3.  Not the new 4.0 release.
• WP7 will now allow background running apps (similar to iPhone) but will support notifications for other apps to be displayed. 
• WP7 is ditching ActiveSync in favor of the Zune interface.
• All apps will have to be distributed via the Windows Phone Marketplace.  They do support a “Try before you Buy” option but there isn’t going to be any capability to distribute apps privately (i.e. if you wanted to distribute them to all the WP7s connected to your work network) in this release.
• WP7 is capable of watching NetFlix on the go.
• WP7 will wirelessly sync your data (pictures, contacts, etc) when it is charging and detects your home network.
• Apps for WP7 will be developed in either Silverlight for WP7 or XNA for WP7.
• There is no cut and paste (YET!) in WP7.
• WP7 will launch sometime around Holiday 2010. 

They blatantly stated that the first release (re: Holiday 2010) is focused on the consumer and not business users.  I’m hoping they’ll at least put in the email / exchange calendar syncing they currently have in WinMo 6.5 so that WP7 will at least be usable at a business level but that remains to be seen.  The huge focus seemed to be on streaming media and integration with social networks.  For example, there wasn’t a “Facebook app” per say, but you could go to your photos and see photos your friends had added to Facebook and comment on them.  All of this from INSIDE the WP7 interface.  The phone DOES have some capability to have background running programs but it won’t be available to third party developers for this release.  The example they showed was music.  You could play a song and then leave music and go to a different app and have it continuing to play music.  All that said, development for WP7 seems remarkably easy.  I had the Dev tools installed in the session following the keynote and had a Hello World app running minutes later.  Since there aren’t really any actual phone units available to dev against (the rumor mill was abuzz on Monday saying that they’d be handing out dev units) the dev tools come with a WP7 emulator.  The biggest issue with the emulator is that it doesn’t actually emulate the hardware of the WP7.  This makes sense from a performance during development point of view, however, it means that your app isn’t guaranteed to run the same on the emulator as it is on the WP7.  I’m excited to play around and hope to make some more WP7 apps soon.

In other news, they also announced more formally the release of the Open Data Protocol.  ODP is a standard way of making data available via a “web service interface” so that the data can be filtered and accessed via a url based querying system.  So instead of passing over specific parameters to get whatever specific data you want (and the developer having to code all of those methods) creating an OData service, handles all of that for you.  The example they demonstrated was a Netflix ODATA feed that allowed you to get any sort of data about movies, the actors in them, etc.  They also showed off “codename Dallas” which was a way to publicize and sell your data service.  Lastly, they also announced the IE9 Test Drive.   IE9 still needs some work but it’s hardware acceleration of HTML5 looks pretty impressive. 

One last thing.  I had a chance to talk briefly with Adam Kinney who is a tech evangelist at Microsoft for Expression Studio and Silverlight.  He’s an awfully smart guy with a lot of passion for design.  He pointed me at this Design Toolbox site which tries to make learning about design fun and easy.  I’m looking forward to going through that site a lot once I get back to Michigan and have more time available.

While innocently adding some files to my ftp server so that I could access them remotely, I logged into my server interface to check on some permissions.  Then I noticed something a little funky going on.  Someone was repeatedly trying to log in to my ftp server.   What kind of craziness could this be?

Why would this “Angelica” person be trying to get into my ftp server?  I scrolled up and realized it wasn’t just her.  Angelica’s friends Angela and Angel were also trying to get at my files from the same IP!  Could it be as the stars had foretold and that a 4-some with ftp aware girls was finally going to go down?  There was only one way to find out.  I did a “Who Is” check on the IP address.  Alas, the requests were all coming from an IP in Amsterdam.    So either 3 Dutch chicks are really lonely or, more likely, my ftp server was under a brute force attack.  At this point I can feel nothing but pride.  Though, if they were up to Angelica, how many attempts had they already made?   Sadly, I couldn’t figure out how to make my ftp server redirect them to zombo.com, so I settled with blocking their IP address.

For the past 2 years, I have been registering domains through and hosting my web sites with GoDaddy.  While I’ve had moderate issues with customer support, I haven’t run into any issues that really made me think “it’s time to move on.”  That was until my most recent spat regarding my emails getting marked as spam.  Allow me to first explain.

I have several (6) sites hosted through my GoDaddy shared hosting account.  As far as price goes, GoDaddy is fantastic.  However, keep in mind that you get what you pay for.  When using shared hosting through GoDaddy, if you want to send emails programmatically, through code that is, you need to use their mail relay servers.  A mail relay server is essentially a box that takes in email messages and routes them out onto the internet so they get to where they need to go. 

Up until the beginning of February (approximately) all of the emails I was sending through the GoDaddy mail relay were going into inboxes just fine.  Keep in mind we’re not talking about a lot of emails.  Maybe 10 a week typically.  If that many.  All of a sudden around February 3rd, I realized that while people were commenting here, I wasn’t getting any sort of notification.  So I did the first thing I could think of: I came to my site and filled out the contact form as well as left comments.  Both of which should have triggered an email.  Seeing that they weren’t making it into my email box, I contacted GoDaddy support. 

The first request was:

Several of my websites send email through relay-hosting.secureserver.net and as of yesterday (that I know of) none of the emails seem to be making it through (last known successful was on Jan 29th). Is there an issue with the mail server?

Their response was (paraphrased):

If you continue to experience a problem, please let us know the url of the page as well as the steps we can take to duplicate the issue.  Also, here’s how to take a screenshot.

While I understand that they have to offer support that both the slack jawed yokel and the software engineer can understand, no where in their response is there even a shred of an answer to the question I posed.

My follow-up request:

I guess I should clarify. I'm NOT getting an error sending an email through your web client or anything like that. I am sending emails through my asp.net web site using the goaddy relay server as specified here; http://help.godaddy.com/article/955. Up until the past couple of days, this worked fine. I have made NO code changes and DO NOT require code help.. I am NOT getting any errors when I try to email through relay-hosting.secureserver.net but it is not working. Can someone please check this out?

Their response (again paraphrased):

We need to know how to reproduce this.  Please give us more information.

While I was pretty sure I had specified EXACTLY how I was using their mail relay to send email through my asp.net web site, I’ll give them a bone and try to be helpful.  My next (we’re on number 3 here) email explained how to get to my contact page and exactly what happened (again that it sent email through their relay server) when they used the form.

Their (3rd) response (paraphrased):

What address are you expecting to receive this email on.  We aren’t showing any issues with our relay servers.

It was at this point that I thought that maybe the emails were making it through and going to the spam folder.  Sure enough, there they were.  Every one had not passed the gmail or the Google Apps spam mail filter.  With this in mind, I sent my 4th support request:

After looking into this more on my side, I think that Google is blacklisting emails from relay-hosting.secureserver.net If I send an email from any of my domains through secureserver.net's relay, they are ending up in spam folders for gmail and google app accounts. I'm very certain it has to do with secureserver relaying the emails as when I send the emails through gmail or google apps (or any other relay I've tried using) they get to their destinations just fine. Just to stress this, the emails ONLY end up in the spam folders when sent through the secure server's relay.

The important things here are that I’m stating that the emails going through their relay server are being marked as spam.  However, if email is sent through the gmail (or google apps mail) interface, none of them are marked as spam. 

GoDaddy’s 4th response:

In case you are using a "from" address in your code with referring to our shared hosting email relay server, please confirm that you are not referring to a major free email provider such as Gmail as the "from" address, as this will most likely result in the emails being blocked.   For testing / set-up purposes, we would recommend not referring t any free Web-based email service to confirm that you are referring to our email relay servers correctly.

A fair point.  The emails should show up as coming from my domain.  Oh wait, they are.  The emails were coming from either an address at this domain or an address at a different domain.  Both hosted at GoDaddy, both sending emails through their relay.  The important thing to remember here is that it wasn’t just one domain I was having issues with.  It was two separate domains.  In my 5th response, I stated these things. 

Their 5th response:

Unfortunately we cannot control how emails are filtered by the recipient. Please note that our server admins work to keep our email servers off of block-lists. Since you do receive the messages it seems that we are not on their block-list. If you are receiving the messages in a spam, or bulk folder you will need to specify that the message is not spam to prevent this from happening.

First, I never asked them to do anything such as control how Google filter’s their mail.  Second, I never claimed the email servers were on a “block-list”.  For those of you not in the know, email providers, such as Google, use many different criteria when determining if an incoming email is spam.  One of those ways is based off the “reputation” of the mail server it comes from.  The idea being that as emails come through, if people say “this email is spam”, that mail server’s reputation goes down.  Eventually it get’s to a point where all emails coming from it are marked as spam by that email provider.  If the mail server continues to offend, it’s put on a “block-list” and emails just aren’t let through at all.  So while I never said the mail server was on a “block-list”, I certainly wouldn’t be insane thinking that maybe their mail server had been blacklisted and the emails marked as spam.  At this point, I was really just looking for them to at least own up to the possibility that their mail server’s reputation was so bad, emails were getting sent directly to spam folders. 

My 6th, and final support communication:

Perhaps I am missing something that you can explain. Two separate domains that I have hosted through GoDaddy are both using GoDaddy's mail relay server. Suddenly, mail from both of these domains start failing Google's spam filter. However, when emails are sent via these email accounts (not using the relay server) they do not fail the spam filter. I think my assumption that there is an issue with the relay servers' email being marked as spam is solid. As it stands, I am unable to use a secure external relay due to port 587 being blocked. In addition, you seem unwilling or incapable of offering any real assistance. Can my ticket be escalated please?

So here, I’m laying my case out completely.  Two different domains, both using the GoDaddy mail relay, have both started being sent directly to the spam folders of google mail accounts.  Emails sent through these accounts NOT using the relay server (either through the mail interface or their smtp / imap clients) are not marked as spam.  Furthermore, I can’t switch to using gmail’s SMTP mail relay to send my emails from my web site.  Due to ports being blocked, GoDaddy’s mail relay is my only option.  At this point, I’m tired of dealing with people that can’t answer any of my questions to any degree of satisfaction. 

Their 6th response:

As stated in our previous response, we cannot control how Google filters their mail. You will need to contact Google, or whitelist the emails to prevent them from being filtered as spam. We thank you for your understanding in this matter.

A complete failure to provide any assistance whatsoever.  I did like that they said I could “whitelist” the emails despite a complete lack of explanation on why they might be “blackelisted” in the first place.  As I can’t switch to a different mail relay, as explained above, I don’t really have any other options.  I am currently in the process of examining alternative hosting solutions and have started recommending friends away from GoDaddy (two have already asked me questions leading to suggestions for alternate registrars and hosting solutions).  I would rather start paying more for better service and actual options than continue with GoDaddy.  (On a side note, GoDaddy might have 24 hour support, but when you state that there is a 2 hour wait for responses to email support questions and then take 4.5 hours to respond, your 24 hour support really doesn’t mean shit).

Update: 6/24/2010
I've since moved all of my hosting off GoDaddy. You can read about my new host, Arvixe, here.