Godaddy SMTP server randomly rejects emails

I have a few websites that run Joomla and send some notification emails via Godaddy SMTP server smtpout.europe.secureserver.net. Godaddy only allows 250 SMTP relays per day for free, but for this particular purpose this was more than enough.

One day I noticed that I was not receiving all notification emails I was supposed to receive. First of all all I logged on to Joomla's administration panel and tried to send some test emails using Joomla's built-in Mass Mail functionality. Results were interesting - most of the time emails would go through, but around 30% of the time sending would fail with error:

The following from address failed: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Joomla! doesn't detect latest updates

Noticed that few of my Joomla websites were still on version 2.5.11 when the current version was 2.5.19. Joomla auto-update page was misleadingly saying that Joomla was up-to-date.

Force mp3, pdf and other files to download (Apache)

If your website visitor clicks on a URL that links to a file, such as mp3, mp4, doc, pdf, etc., the file will be displayed/played inside the browser if the browser supports that particular format. This is inconsistent across different browsers as not all browsers support the same file formats.

To make experience more consistent you can force files to be downloaded rather than be displayed inside browsers.

Joomla native captcha (reCAPTCHA) not working

Issue

Integrated Joomla captcha (reCAPTCHA) does not appear in the front end.