I resell web hosting and e-mail from an account at Globat. I've written about them several times (Cheap Web Hosting, Globat e-mail, Globat e-mail, Part 2, and Globat Support). Overall, these have been satisfactory in the end.
A couple of weeks ago, my customer called me complaining about spam. I looked around on Globat and found that they have a facility called GloSpamShield. It looked like a pretty good system so I tried to order it. I got several different stories but in the end they added it to my account for $29.95. So far, so good.
Then I went to my control panel to enable it. It wouldn't enable on any of my accounts. To make a long story a little shorter, an escalation to Lou Rio got Luis Banda on it and he got all but one enabled. That one NEVER got enabled. That problem might have been a sign I should have heeded.
The default level is "Medium" and is the recommended starting point. At that level, my customer didn't see any difference in spam so I bumped it to "Medium - High." Then pretty much everything got blocked. So I turned on "Held E-mails." It worked very differently on different accounts. Some would have lots of held e-mails and some would have none. There was no rhyme nor reason.
After a number of tickets with Globat support, I gave up and went to turn off GloSpamShield. It wouldn't turn off! At this point, Luis Banda quit responding. I had to contact billing and request a credit for GloSpamShield which they promptly gave AND turned off the feature. I guess money talks.
Whew. I thought I was done but I had just started.
My customer called me fuming! He sent an e-mail to a bank to meet a deadline and it was rejected by Globat as being "unsolicited bulk e-mail." This guy sends less than 10 e-mails a week.
A panic call to Globat revealed that this domain had been blacklisted. They agreed to whitelist it immediately but could never explain why it had been blacklisted.
This e-mail rejection and promised whitelisting has happened 3 times so far. Each time, I have been assured that the domain was whitelisted and that they would get me an explanation. None has been forthcoming.
Today, I think I figured it out. In attempting to rescue this customer, I created new e-mail accounts at another ISP and forwarded the Globat e-mail accounts to them. Remember that these are virgin e-mail accounts. Never been seen or used. Oh, and the account names aren't subject to dictionary attacks.
Within 48 hours, these new mailboxes are now getting bounced e-mails saying that they have sent virus infested e-mail. The only way that spammers could have gotten these e-mail accounts is to have hacked into Globat's mail servers' forwarding information.
And I'm still not getting any response from Globat support.
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