Lollipop Local

I hate spammers.

I hate them because they fill up my inbox with ridiculous and unnecessary comments that I have to trawl through to separate them out from the real people with something valuable to add to my posts.

I hate them because I have to put captcha codes on my contact form to deter them from trying to send strings of meaningless letters and numbers for a reason that I cannot comprehend.

I hate them because they make it so much harder for bona fide websites to rank on the front pages of the search engines with their scraped, spun, nonsensical content.

But today I hate them because they send out spammy emails via the php mail function of my shared hosting. As a result, the lovely people at eukhost have been left with no choice but to discontinue the php mail function on their shared hosting accounts. This means that any contact forms on the websites I host will stop working because they all use the php mail function to send each missive from the enquiry page to my inbox.

As a webmistress, I am left with two choices:

1. Change my current hosting arrangements to a more expensive package which does still allow php mail function.

The downsides to this option are that I will then have to go to the registrars of every website that I host and change the nameservers which is rather time consuming and may result in those websites going offline for 24-48 hours whilst the new information is populated – with the possibility that the very people who are responsible for this problem in the first place could just change their own hosting arrangements and force me into this same position in a year’s time.

2. Change my current contact form arrangements to use smtp authentication by adding the ‘wp mail smtp’ plugin and going through each website’s settings to utilise the client’s gmail account for smtp provision – another time-consuming process.

So far, I am tending towards the latter option and I am indebted to both 4 Rapid Development and the Fast Secure Contact Form forum for helping me to navigate what was an intensely intimidating prospect at first glance.

Originally posted 2011-07-30 13:35:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2013 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Email, Webmistress Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.