sending emails html/plain

rakennedy75

I am sending an email list (with the users permission of course) through php using html tags. For the most part I have no problem here except some spam issues with some of the new services like aol. I guess aol has been making it difficult for people to send spam and at the same time it has made it difficult to send emails to people that have signed up for mailing lists. Is it that aol doesn't except emails with html tags? I am not sure how to fix this. I admit I am somewhat ignorant about this particular area of the web but hopefully someone on here can help me with this.

I am using the mail funciton in PHP and from my understanding this goes through the post office on the server (not really my area, I just write the code). I have noticed that it doesn't even seem to recognize aol as a email, it seems to ignore the host name for some reason.

My administrator mentioned a possible solution, he said something about sending the emails through another SMTP server. I really have no idea on where to start with this or where to look to find info on how to do this. I don't even know if this is a valid solution.

If there are any other solutions to sending these emails to hosts like aol than I would appreciate the help. Unfortunately, all the spam out there has punished legitimately requested emails.

Sorry about the length, just wanted to be as clear as possible. Thanks for your time.

yelvington

Could be any number of issues, including AOL blacklisting your server. Can you send plain text from the server to AOL?

rakennedy75

Sorry it took so long to get back to this post. I just tested on aol with plain text emails. It didn't work using the mail function. I changed my headers from

Content-type:text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n
Cntent-type:text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n

and sent a one sentence test message with no formatting. This still does not work. I am not sure what exactly this means. I did send to a couple of email hosts to make sure the script was working, no problem on with other email hosts so far.

I guess what I wanna know, is there a way to get the html emails to send correctly to the aol email and if not, is there a way I can get the plain text emails to work?

Any direction on this would be helpful.
Thanks for your time

yelvington

If you can send mail elsewhere and it just doesn't show up on AOL, I would suspect that AOL's spam filters are eating it. AOL rejects mail from known spammers, but also from known dynamic addresses and legitimate Web hosting companies that have had one or two problems with -- ahem -- questionable customers.

You might be able to get someone at AOL to talk with you about this problem, but I wouldn't hold my breath. :-(

rakennedy75

I understand what your saying but in this case I don't think that is the reason, can't be sure about this though. This would be the first time that I am sending bulk mail from this IP address/web address. Our company is relatively new to web developing and we don't share out access to our server. I am currently the only developer that has worked with our company. I checked the spam folder to see if it captures any emails, and it didn't seem to catch any.

From my understanding, there are no workarounds for this? At least that is what it seems like you are saying. Again, I am sending a legitimate mailing list which at one time or another we were given permission to send mail to these clients. I am also providing a link in the mail to unsubscribe to the mailing list. I don't condone or support spam in any way at all.

one method I was looking at doing was to try and connect to my SMTP server and send the email through that. I don't know if this would make any difference or if this is even possible. I will attempt this and see if I have any luck.

If anyone has any more thoughts on how to approach this, I would appreciate the help.

Thanks everyone for your time, I appreciate the feed back

yelvington

If you're running your own server, you should have access to the logfile of the SMTP layer -- take a look and see if AOL is rejecting messages. Better, yet, run tail -f mail.log and watch it while some mail is going through.