GoDaddy SMTP at a glance
GoDaddy's Workspace Email and Professional Email products use smtpout.secureserver.net for SMTP submission. Port 465 with SSL/TLS is the documented default; port 587 with STARTTLS works too and is the better choice if your network blocks 465. IMAP runs on imap.secureserver.net:993 with SSL, POP3 on pop.secureserver.net:995 with SSL.
The first thing to figure out before any of these settings matter: which GoDaddy email product do you actually have? GoDaddy sells two completely different mail services under the same brand, and the SMTP settings for one don't work for the other.
Workspace Email vs. Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy
GoDaddy's "Workspace Email" (sometimes branded "Professional Email") is GoDaddy's own mail product, hosted on GoDaddy infrastructure. The hostnames are all on the secureserver.net domain. Pricing tier matches the marketing language about "professional email" with your own domain at a few dollars a month.
"Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy" — sometimes called "Microsoft 365 Email Essentials" or "Microsoft 365 Online" — is GoDaddy reselling Microsoft 365. The mailboxes live on Microsoft's infrastructure, and the SMTP host is smtp.office365.com:587, not smtpout.secureserver.net. Same Microsoft 365 settings as any direct Microsoft 365 tenant.
If you're not sure which one you have, check the GoDaddy email control panel. Workspace shows mailbox controls and tools branded with the GoDaddy interface. Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy bounces you over to Outlook on the web at outlook.office.com when you click into the mailbox. Once you know the product, the rest follows.
Step-by-step GoDaddy Workspace Email SMTP setup
1. Confirm SMTP relay is enabled
GoDaddy's email control panel exposes a per-mailbox SMTP relay setting. Sign in at email.godaddy.com, find the mailbox, and confirm SMTP is enabled. New mailboxes usually have it on by default; mailboxes that have triggered abuse heuristics get it suspended.
2. Configure outgoing mail
- SMTP server:
smtpout.secureserver.net - Port:
465(SSL) or587(STARTTLS) - Encryption: SSL/TLS on 465; STARTTLS on 587
- Authentication: required
- Username: full email address (you@yourdomain.com)
- Password: mailbox password from the GoDaddy email control panel
Port 465 is the default GoDaddy documents. In practice, port 587 with STARTTLS is the more reliable choice on networks that block or rate-limit 465. Either works against the same submission server with the same credentials.
3. Configure incoming IMAP
- IMAP server:
imap.secureserver.net - Port:
993 - Encryption: SSL/TLS
- Username and password: same as SMTP
4. POP3 if you really need it
Use IMAP unless you have a specific reason to use POP3. POP downloads messages and (by default) removes them from the server, which means the inbox state diverges across devices. IMAP keeps everything synced.
- POP3 server:
pop.secureserver.net - Port:
995 - Encryption: SSL/TLS
5. Test and watch the daily cap
Send a test message. Confirm it arrives. Then read the next section, because if you're configuring this for outbound mail of any volume, the daily cap is going to bite.
The 250-relays-per-day cap
GoDaddy Workspace Email caps outbound SMTP submission at roughly 250 relays per day on standard plans. Higher plan tiers raise the cap, but no GoDaddy mailbox plan offers the kind of headroom that an actual sending workload needs. The cap is a soft anti-spam mechanism, not a configurable quota — there's no plan upgrade that turns it off.
A "relay" here is one outbound message accepted by GoDaddy's submission server. A message to two recipients counts as one relay if you submit it once with two RCPT TOs; it counts as two relays if you submit it twice. Most clients submit per-recipient.
For a small business sending normal one-to-one mail, 250/day is rarely the bottleneck. For anything that approaches batch sending — even small newsletter blasts to a few hundred customers — you'll hit it. GoDaddy explicitly does not market Workspace Email as a sending platform, and they enforce that with the cap.
Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy — different settings
If you bought Microsoft 365 through GoDaddy, none of the secureserver.net hostnames apply. Use the standard Microsoft 365 SMTP settings:
- SMTP:
smtp.office365.comport 587, STARTTLS - IMAP:
outlook.office365.comport 993, SSL/TLS - POP3:
outlook.office365.comport 995, SSL/TLS
The same Microsoft 365 caveats apply: SMTP AUTH may be disabled by default on the mailbox, Basic Auth is being retired in favor of OAuth 2.0, and the daily cap is 10,000 recipients per mailbox at 30 messages per minute. The fact that GoDaddy is the reseller doesn't change anything about the underlying Microsoft 365 service.
Common GoDaddy SMTP errors
Authentication failed. Three usual causes. First, you're using just the local part of the email address as the username instead of the full address. GoDaddy wants the full you@yourdomain.com. Second, the mailbox password got changed in the control panel and the client didn't pick it up. Third, you've hit the 250/day cap and the relay is refused with an auth-style error rather than a clean rate-limit response.
Connection refused on smtpout.secureserver.net:465. Network is blocking 465. Switch to 587 with STARTTLS. Same credentials, same server, different port and encryption negotiation.
"You bought Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy" error. If your client is failing against smtpout.secureserver.net with auth errors and the mailbox is actually a Microsoft 365 mailbox sold by GoDaddy, the SMTP host is wrong. Switch to smtp.office365.com:587.
Recipient policy block. GoDaddy applies anti-spam heuristics on the submission side. If a single message looks too spammy (links to flagged domains, mismatched From addresses, certain attachment types), GoDaddy refuses it before it ever leaves the server. Modify the message and try again.
Reputation reality on smtpout.secureserver.net
GoDaddy's outbound IPs are heavily shared. Every Workspace Email mailbox on a given outbound IP shares reputation with every other Workspace mailbox sending through that IP. GoDaddy hosts millions of small businesses, which means the IP pool is sending the full spectrum of mail — careful one-to-one business mail mixed with whatever's going on at the other tenants.
For normal business correspondence, this is fine. Major mailbox providers know GoDaddy's IPs and accept legitimate mail from them. For anything that approaches volume sending — newsletters, transactional bursts, cold outreach — the shared reputation works against you. A few bad tenants on your IP can drop your inbox placement overnight, and you have no visibility into who's on the same IP or what they're doing.
GoDaddy SMTP for cold outreach — the honest answer
GoDaddy Workspace Email is not designed for cold outbound, and using it for cold email is a fast way to burn the mailbox. Three reasons that all stack on each other.
The 250-relays-per-day cap means a single inbox can't sustain even a modest cold campaign. To send 500 cold messages per day, you'd need three inboxes minimum, and at that point the per-inbox volume is so low that warmup math gets fragile. The 2:1 warmup-to-cold ratio (two warmup emails for every one cold email) holds forever in cold email — that's 750 daily total per the three inboxes, which puts each above the 250 cap individually if not orchestrated carefully.
The shared reputation on GoDaddy outbound IPs means your sending sits on top of whatever else is happening on the same IPs. You don't get to control who else is on the IP or how much they're sending. Cold outreach amplifies that exposure — your campaigns get filtered based on the IP's behavior, not just yours.
The lack of reputation isolation between the cold-email mailbox and your primary domain is the third problem. If your cold-email mailbox is on the same domain as your customer service, billing, or website, one bad cold week affects everything. The cold-email-correct pattern is many separate domains, each forwarding to your real business website, with two to three low-volume inboxes per domain isolated from your production identity.
That's the infrastructure ScaledMail provisions and monitors as a service: real Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mailboxes on dedicated cold-email sending domains, ready to plug into your sequencer (Smartlead, Instantly, EmailBison, PlusVibe). GoDaddy Workspace Email is the right answer for your team's day-to-day mail. It's the wrong answer for outbound campaigns.