Now We Start Taking Hostages
Jun 27 2008
So with a release a few months back from GoDaddy telling people that they now offer an email marketing platform for GoDaddy Domain owners, they release this… basically if you get a spam complaint and you host your domain with them, they will charge you $200 and $75 to get your domain back. Now everyone (trust me here) deals with a spam complaint every now and then as consumers feel it is easier to mark as spam than it is to unsubscribe. So are they now going to hold brands and companies hostage for pay anytime some marks an email as spam or junk? Or just when they file a formal complaint? I really don’t know but I think this is a bonehead move. Maybe it is just to scare their own customers hwo are using their email marketing service whom host with them as they could be non educated email marketers just happy with paying $7/mo to send emails?
From Deliverability.com
Don’t host domains at GoDaddy if you do email marketing (who doesn’t?)
A reader forwarded this GoDaddy message to me (I have anonymized it) asking for advice. Apparently GoDaddy is now charging for handling spam complaints and has a $200 “spam tax” for clients that do email marketing. If they receive spam complaints against you, they are claiming that they will hold your domain ransom unless you pay $75 to release it.
Basically, GoDaddy is saying that if you do email marketing or have affiliates that send emails linking to your site, they don’t want your business.
- Posted by Dylan Boyd
- @dtboyd
- at 8:53 AM
Published in E-Mail Delivery, Email News, ISP Relations, Spam Emails, The Spam Cops
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June 27th, 2008 at 10:31 am
What a bunch of crap! I have a domain hosted on GoDaddy, and I’ll be shopping around now. Any referrals you could offer? Thanks for posting this!
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We have a bunch there as well and are moving to another provider. We have looked at Dotster lately but are still evaluating our move. With 1000s of project and campaigns domains set up for clients, this is not an easy move.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:46 am
“Now everyone (trust me here) deals with a spam complaint every now and then as consumers feel it is easier to mark as spam than it is to unsubscribe.”
A spam complaint? If you have any volume you will get quite a few every time you send. It’s part of life, as you said, many people use the spam button to delete an email or to unsubscribe from a list. They don’t know or care if there is a difference.
This just further proves that GoDaddy has no idea how to manage an email system. From this alone I would be very concerned about what kind of deliverability they are getting.
June 28th, 2008 at 9:47 am
The fees Godaddy is charging have changed, but the story hasn’t.
By the way, they started this “tax” shortly after Bob Parson’s attempt at taking GoDaddy public failed. A coincidence? I think not!
June 29th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Yikes. This is really horrible. I have a few domains at GoDaddy, and I also do a bit of email marketing with at least one of them. I’m not a spammer, but like you and others said, people often mark email as spam just out of laziness, instead of pressing delete or unsubscribe.
It’s such a pain moving domains to another registrar. Luckily I’ve been buying my most recent domains from name.com, and I’ve been pretty happy so far.