Can't take this any longer!!!

Customer Support Server/Network Issues
1

Where is that mail fix that we were told 3 weeks ago was to be implemented in 7-14 days???

I have already lost 2 clients, worked my tail off to save a third, and now I am about to lose a fourth!!! Every week I have to deal with these mail problems and I can’t take this anymore!!!

I just received an email from a long-standing customer of mine who has been with me going back 4+ years, from even before I started reselling JodoHost services! This is a huge client that has done thousands upon thousands of dollars in web work with us!

First, they called us last week to complain about SPAM! They are being hosted on mail3. Today, I received the following email from them:

[I]****,

I just got a phone call from the Federal Govt. saying they cannot e-mail me.
It is being sent back by my server as Spam.

We do business with the Feds monthly and this Spam thing is not good.

Can you look into it for me please?

Yours truly,

************************[/I]

I am so fed up with these problems!!! I can’t concentrate on my real business, which is development! I cannot concentrate on getting sales! I am forever having to deal with one customer after the other complaining to me on a daily basis about SPAM, blocked emails, lost emails!!!

What are you doing about this??? I don’t want to have to stop in the middle of my busy schedule to have to take all of my clients to another company because; I simply do not have time and I can?t afford that much of an inconvenience!!! But, if something is not done about this immediately, I will have no choice! This inconvenience is becoming worse than moving!

I can’t keep losing my business over these stupid email problems! I pay Jodo to handle these things for me but I have to keep on fixing things myself! What am I paying you for??? Can you answer that?

My clients are way too important to me. If I continue to lose them, I will go out of business! And, I am sure that my reputation has already taken a hit when the clients I lose go out and tell others to stay away from us!

In addition to the problems with this client, our own corporate mail has been getting hit hard with SPAM for about a week or two! Before that, I had actually noticed a few days of relative quite. Then gradually, it started creeping in again - more and more each day. For the past week, we have been receiving over 150/day!!! It seems that all I am ever doing is deleting SPAM!!!

This is just totally unacceptable! What has to happen before you people start taking this situation seriously??? Do something about it already, will ya?X(

2

Hello???

3

Is anyone from JodoHost on this JodoHost Forum?

4

I hope this is being taken care as well. My clients are on me also and I had to tell one important client to give me 3 weeks- 2 weeks ago with the comcast issues.

5

Maybe it’s better if they don’t answer me. If I have to hear one more time that: “there is nothing we can do - this is not our fault - everyone just better get used to it”, I think I’m going to explode!

I can’t give those kinds of excuses to my clients! They would drop me in a heartbeat if I did! They don’t want to hear excuses from my company and quite frankly, I don’t want to hear them from Jodo!

I might be a relatively small reseller compared to some here, but I am also a small company… so $420/year is a big expense for me. I think that I deserve something better than, "Oh sorry, there is nothing that can be done… guess you’ll have to fend for yourself!

I have heard them say on countless occasions that they are “rarely” blacklisted on big sites. Well, I think that the Federal Government of the United States of America is about as big as they come! What in the heck am I going to do here? I don’t even know how in the world I am going to explain this to this particular client? They are just NOT going to understand this! I’m screwed! My biggest concern here is that if I lose this client, the biggest one I have, my company will have to close! Without them, I have no company!

6

I just got a phone call from the Federal Govt. saying they cannot e-mail me.
It is being sent back by my server as Spam.

We do business with the Feds monthly and this Spam thing is not good.

Can you look into it for me please?

Yours truly,
****************I just got a phone call from the Federal Govt. saying they cannot e-mail me.
It is being sent back by my server as Spam.

We do business with the Feds monthly and this Spam thing is not good.

Can you look into it for me please?

Yours truly,

That would mean that our server is blocking the federal govt? Hmm, i can only see that happening if they are listed in one of the RBLs we use (mainly spamcop and a few others) or the customer is blacklisting them.

I suggest you put in a ticket for this. It isn’t related to receiving more spam at all, if i understand the issue correctly.

As far as our progress towards our new filtering system, we will have our dspam systems up tomorow and will begin integration/testing. We are hoping to have it operational end of this month, possibly the first week of december as I already stated. We have dropped $10,000 on this project so far.. not counting the number of hours tanmaya and myself have been putting in this.

7

Hey, give me a sec here. I took a dinner break and i’m back. I replied within 20 min.

You can yell at me as much as you want, rightfully of course I know this is an issue. But trust me, I am waaaaay more concerned/distressed about rising spam levels than you are. I am putting alot of hours into this…

We aren’t dealing with a plug and play solution.. non exists for our problem. There is ALOT of customisation work that is being done and has to be done. I’m even considering rushing in some load-balancers to create a long-term stable solution here

8

You can yell at me as much as you want, rightfully of course I know this is an issue. But trust me, I am waaaaay more concerned/distressed about rising spam levels than you are. I am putting alot of hours into this…
Yash,

Believe me, I don’t want to have to “yell” at anyone. I am just waaaaaay stressed out with all of these email problems. Please understand, we are a very small company with just (3) employees and we don’t have 18,000 customers like you do. On the contrary, we have just a handful!

All three of us work around the clock on a daily basis to try and service our customers the best we know how in the hopes that they will stay with us and hopefully, so we can earn some new customers now and then. So yes, I am concerned/distressed about these issues… granted, on a much smaller scale than you are, but still very concerned!

Also, I am not directing all of my anger right at you or even all at JodoHost! It is obvious that the “spammers” are the root cause of all of this trouble and so most of my anger is directed at them! But when my customers call me up or email me and “yell” at me like I am purposely trying to cause trouble for them and they ridicule my company like we are some kind of lowlifes, I kind of lose my temper! I’m sorry I laid it all on your doorstep. It has been a very trying week for me I guess.

That would mean that our server is blocking the federal govt? Hmm, i can only see that happening if they are listed in one of the RBLs we use (mainly spamcop and a few others) or the customer is blacklisting them.
Well, maybe if I would have controlled my temper a little and took the time to read my clients email I would have seen this. Apparently, what must have happened here is this: when they called me last week complaining about all of the Spam they were receiving, I went on the server and raised Spamassassin to the Very Aggressive setting. After doing this, they called back a couple of days later and said that the Spam level had been reduced down to just 30-40 per day. They weren?t happy with that, but said they could live with it. Obviously, the higher Spam setting must be blocking the Fed?s emails. If this is the case, then for them to get their emails, I will have to put the setting back to where it was.

The only problem with that is that their Spams will increase again back to 90-150 per day! It?s a catch-22! I can?t win for losing! I just hope that this new solution of yours is finally going to do the trick! I just can?t take much more of this.

I suggest you put in a ticket for this. It isn’t related to receiving more spam at all, if i understand the issue correctly.
I can?t do that at the moment Yash. I received that email at the end of my ?clients? workday. He didn?t provide me with any more information pertaining to that problem. I am going to have to contact them in the morning and address this situation then. I just wish I had a better solution for him than lowering his Spam setting because I know he is not going to be happy with that solution!

Lastly, if I may say, I have been very happy with most everything else here at JodoHost since we have been clients of yours. I most certainly would like to keep a more cordial business tone with you folks if possible. This email thing lately has just got me all bent out of shape, and so I apologize for losing my temper as I did. I know you are all trying very hard to solve this problem.

Please accept my apologies.

9

you can whitelist the all federal email addresses and keep the spam filtering level at aggressive.
If I were you, I’d signup for postini or mailwise or mailfoundry.com and set your high-end clients up on that temporarily.

10

you can whitelist the all federal email addresses and keep the spam filtering level at aggressive.
Thanks for reminding me of this. I guess I am just not thinking very clearly at the moment.

If I were you, I’d signup for postini or mailwise or mailfoundry.com and set your high-end clients up on that temporarily
Yes, the new ISP that just took over the hosting for that other client I lost the other day uses postini. I spoke to them about their spam issues and they said that they have none! All because of postini! I thought that Jodo was going to look into that solution too?

I guess I will have to do that for now. Thanks.

11

yes, I talked to postini alot. Basically, they wanted to charge us $0.30/mo per mail box. Wouldn’t go below that, and we have 120K mailboxes and put no limitations on the # of mail boxes a customer can create.

So really, it doesn’t fit our business model :frowning:

12

My customers on average use less than 10 boxes each. If you made that available in HSphere as an add-on option, we could offer our customers the regular spam filtering standard and market postini with a small markup.

For example: $5.00/mo, per 10 boxes. That wouldn’t cost Jodo anything!

Is it possible to add that into HSphere? I think I could sell that to my clients when I explain the alternative. Most of them are already experiencing the alternative!

OR, Jodo can charge us $ .40 or $ .50 per box, per mo, and you can make the profit! But still make it an option in HSphere. I wouldn’t really care, as long as it eliminates the problem!

13

You can go ahead and purchase postini and we’ll set it up for your clients.

We only get their .30 cents pricing at a very high volume. Their regular price is $2/mo per mailbox.

mailwise is cheaper.

14

mailfoundry.com is cheaper.. so is mailwise.com
Go for any solution, email me and I’ll personally set it up for your clients.

15

Won’t DSpam you working on do the samething?

16

yes it will. We should be able to achieve accuracy levels close to most commercial solutions in a short time.
But as I said, we are still a while away (upto 14 days) from dspam going live. if you are losing clients, by all means go for a 3rd party in the mean time

17

yea I know. I am trying hold my clients as well as long as I can. I think the holidays will save us from losing anyone as everyone is out of town. We hope!

18

mailfoundry.com is only $1.00/each up to the first 100 boxes. What was their price for 120K mailboxes?

19

Whitelist/blacklists are the last resort for spam issues. Your clients can always use them as mentioned earlier. It is already an available solution to the main problem of this topic or they can disable any antispam at all at server side and use something like spambayes or other tools available for Mozilla Thunderbird. Lets just calm down a bit and look at what is already available to us while we work on a global solution to the issue.
Please feel free to post about your situation before it gets critical and we will try to give our inputs on it.

20

Whitelist/blacklists are the last resort for spam issues. Your clients can always use them as mentioned earlier. It is already an available solution to the main problem of this topic or they can disable any antispam at all at server side and use something like spambayes or other tools available for Mozilla Thunderbird. Lets just calm down a bit and look at what is already available to us while we work on a global solution to the issue. Please feel free to post about your situation before it gets critical and we will try to give our inputs on it.
Hi tanmaya,

I have calmed down considerably since early last evening when I first posted this thread and if you look in the last few posts you will find my apology.:slight_smile:

I understand what you are saying about Whitelist/blacklists and such, but our clients do not have access to those things. We do not sell our hosting services with control panels. We are developers who sell hosting only as a value-added service to our clients and “we” handle all of their setup and maintenance for them. With that said, when one of our clients contacts us with an issue, they have no idea what the possible solution is. They depend on us solely to handle the problem for them and that is why they have trouble understanding how it could happen in the first place. Believe me, most of our clients don’t even know how to setup Outlook or Thunderbird with their email accounts!:slight_smile: They depend on us for everything!

All is better today, as I have explained to them that it is a relatively easy solution and that we have something in the works that will be in place soon, around December 1st! I of course am talking about DSpam in which Yash spoke about last night. So my customers are fine with that since they now know that there is a fix coming.

And yes, from now on I will try and control my temper BEFORE I post here!:slight_smile: