Dr. Zev

I have had a lot of problems with sending out automatically-generated e-mails from .PHP programs hosted on Godaddy. They are sometimes delayed, and often do not arrive at all. I have had extensive correspondence with Godaddy, and, at this point, it seems that they do not care.

The strategy I’m using is to send out a “mini-blast” of four e-mails, each going to me by two different paths. One path goes through IEEE’s aliasing service, and the other does not. The e-mails are sent out at 7-second intervals, so as to make sure the program finishes executing well before the 30-second time limit. Each e-mail message has two parts, plaintext and HTML. I send out the mini-blasts at irregular intervals, but usually wait at least 45 minutes between mini-blasts.

Each e-mail message is generated by using PHP’s mail() function. The program also records some facts about the message in a database table, including the return value from mail(), which is TRUE if the e-mail apparently was successful, and FALSE if it was not.

I am finding that about half of the e-mails never get through to me. For those that do, some are delayed by annoyingly long times, but, when this happens, both paths (IEEE and non-IEEE) seem to have similar delays. In other tests were the e-mails were also sent to other employees, the delays seem to be similar to, but not identical to, the delays I observed.

Examination of the source codes of the delayed e-mails reveals a pattern to the delays, in that the delay is from a node indicating “qmail”, to a node of with a name like “p3nlsmtp03.shr.prod.phx3.secureserver.net”, and I beleive that both are Godaddy servers. I am not sure, for the e-mails that never arrive, whether they are just delayed to infinity by this same mechanism, or some other mechanism is in play.

I would like to recruit other Godaddy users to repeat this kind of test. The programs and databases I use contain a lot of proprietary stuff, so I’d have to rewrite them from scratch, and then post them on the web. Others, who are interested, could take my non-proprietary source code, customize it, execute it, and gather their own data. We can then present all these data to Godaddy until they come clean, or else start really carping on the web that Godaddy doesn’t always “go”.

I have to warn you that this is a labor-intensive process, but, I think it would be worth it in the long run. Any takers?