• 0 Posts
  • 3 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: February 26th, 2024

help-circle
  • stored in my hosting…

    This, specifically, is the issue people are warning you about. Yes, your hosting account from Bluehost has the ability to handle email, but it’s not great. It’s really there just so the server can send admin emails and such, not support a full email architecture.

    Simplifying - part of the way spam is detected by the servers that receive an email is to check the IP address from where it came from against a list of IP addresses known to deliver spam. If it’s coming from a spam IP, the message is likely spam, so they either put it in the recipient’s spam folder or fail to deliver it entirely.

    Now, you may think you don’t need to be worried because you’re an upstanding web citizen and would never send out spam messages. However, your hosting is on a shared server, with anywhere from a handful to dozens and dozens of not hundreds of other hosting accounts, all sharing the same IP address, and they have this email ability as well. If any one of them, intentionally or unintentionally, sends out a bunch of spam messages and gets your IP address flagged, the entire server loses its reputation for some period of time. Most of the time, this is caused by people not keeping their website security up to date and their site getting infected. The malicious code then goes and sends out as many spam emails as it can before the hosting company shuts things down.

    Unfortunately, you end up having very little control over the situation.

    • You can ask your hosting provider to do something about your malicious/ incompetent neighbor, but they may or may not.

    • You can ask to be moved to a new server, but that’s just playing neighbor roulette.

    • If you are able to get your hosting provider to do something about your neighbor, the other email servers in the world are still going to distrust receiving emails from your IP address for some period of time. You can make requests to try and have your IP address unflagged, that they may or may not do.

    • Even if you do all the leg work of getting your server unflagged, one of your stupid neighbors could immediately get the server flagged again.

    So, as others have said - yes, you can use your hosting account as your email server. But considering it’s only a few bucks a month to have a dedicated email service handle it, it’s generally not worth the hassle and headache.