TLDR: InMotion Hosting has an email deliverability page not talked about much in their help system. If you’re experiencing email deliverability issues, read on.
InMotion Hosting has a robust set of tools and is generally easy to use for those like me with a large set of related skills already in hand. I really love working with them; they have quick, 24-7 customer service via online chat, and I’m never left waiting a long time without a response. They have always been able to fix my problems quickly… with one glaring exception.
I set up a custom business email for myself in the early spring of 2023. The domain in question had never been used before for email purposes, so I was surprised when my customers started alerting me to the fact my emails were going to their spam folder, or not being received at all.
I chatted with InMotion’s support staff regarding the issue, being transferred a couple of times, and finally being told there was nothing they could do. The issue was supposedly that, due to the domain in question being hosted on a shared server, oftentimes the IP address will be used by scammers and therefore blocked by email providers. They tried switching my IP address, to no avail, and recommended I upgrade to a (much more expensive) dedicated server.
This is the only time they’ve suggested switching to a more expensive plan, and I genuinely don’t think they were intentionally avoiding a solution in order to sell me something. I think it was ignorance on the part of the customer service reps at the time.
Their solution seemed wrong for a couple of reasons. First, I have many other email addresses hosted with them, and it hasn’t been an issue with any of the others. They should all have the same IP address as the domain in question. Next, switching the IP address didn’t fix anything.
Admittedly, at this point I lost hope and moved on to other things, switching back to using my Gmail address for outgoing emails.
It’s now the end of December, 2023. In discussion with other businesses I found out that Gmail and Yahoo are requiring more from email senders than they were before, and along with this discussion came more information on DKIM, DMARC, and SPF records.
After some research on my own and chatting with customer service again, I found a solution which takes only minutes, and 1-2 steps.
The Solution
The InMotion Hosting "Email Deliverability" Page
Within cPanel, there is an email deliverability page. Why there are no help articles readily available, or why customer service did not check this first when I came to them with email deliverability problems, we may never know.
Log into your InMotion Hosting admin, click “cPanel”, scroll to the “email” section, and click “email deliverability”.
On this page you will see a list of your domains, and their respective email deliverability status. In most cases, you will see an error message if applicable, and a “repair” button to the right of that. All that was needed for my issue was to click “repair”, and voi-la! Fixed.
If the repair button isn’t clickable, or if your emails are still not being delivered after checking this page and running any applicable repairs, you’ll need to reach out to customer service.
MXTools (or similar programs)
I used MXToolbox to test my email deliverability, both before and after the repair applied via the InMotion email deliverability page. What MX provides is just informational, but helps a lot when troubleshooting.
For more details on exactly how to use it see their help section, but I’ll detail what I did for my specific situation.
From the home page, enter your domain and click “MX Lookup”. This will tell you a bunch of info about your domain. If you see any errors you can click “more info” to see what they recommend doing about them.
From the results page you can click “blacklist check” and “SMTP test” which will both give you even more info and potential issues to resolve.
I then scrolled back to the top and clicked the arrow next to “mx lookup” to see more options, and found “email deliverability”. This option asks you to send an email to a specified email address, and wait for a response report from them. Running this test showed me the main issue for my domain, which was that the DKIM record was invalid. I can attest that I have received no spam email since sending this email and creating an account on the MXToolbox website.
In Conclusion
This solution may not be able to solve all email deliverability issues, but I hope it was able to help troubleshoot and send you in the right direction.