Tag Archives: Blackhole

Sending Email from WordPress Hosted by GoDaddy

If you have just signed up for a newer GoDaddy hosting account (using either cPanel (Linux) or Plesk (Windows)) for a domain that hosts email externally from GoDaddy account you may have problems sending email.

I noticed this problem when trying to send email to new WordPress users (installed via GoDaddy) that I just created and they never got the introductory email from the server.

Mail sent from your web hosting account will be blackholed and never sent out to the external account.  You can confirm this problem by going into cPanel (sorry I don’t know what this looks like in Plesk) and use the Email Trace feature.  Just click Run Report (you don’t need any email address in the list) and look for recently sent email.  The message will show up as “Message Accepted”

GoDaddy Email Trace with Message Accepted

But click on the magnifying glass and the Delivery Event Details will show that this message is delivered to the :blackhole: address.GoDaddy Delivery Event Details showing "Delivered To: :blackhole:"

After an almost two hour phone call with GoDaddy support, their support person was able to contact a back end engineer who “changed something” on our account so that GoDaddy was no longer authoritative for email for our hosting domain and mail correctly started to flow out to the Internet.  I wasn’t able to get GoDaddy Support to clarify exactly what was changed on the back end but it is apparently a new “feature” of the newer hosting platform that hasn’t been reported previously.  There is currently no way to change this through the existing cPanel interface.

So please give your GoDaddy Support a call if you are running into this problem and push for them to escalate to the back end support as soon as possible.