using mail() - get lots of blocked emails

shawjames

I am using the mail() function but many times the emails do not make it to their recipient...

I see this happen almost 100% of the time to hotmail.com and aol.com accounts.

Is there a way to get these emails through?

This is not for spam, it is for automatic notifications that the recipient requests.

... well I guess this does sound like spam, but anyways it is for sending tracking information from my ecom site when orders ship out.

Does anyone know a better way to do this?

krotkruton

I've run into the same problem and haven't come up with any solutions that still use the mail() function, but I have learned a bit about it.
This webpage explains one of the possible reasons for the problem regarding "Bare Line Feeds," and if you check out php.net's information about the mail function and read the user comments, you wil see some other possible causes and a few alternative solutions. Since most of the stuff requires the installation of other software (even though some of it, like PEAR, is more of an add-on), I haven't tried any of it because I'm hoping for a php solution. Anyway, don't know if that helps at all but hopefully it does.

By the way, I have noticed that when using the mail() function, there are certain .edu domains that I cannot send to, while I have two friends with @yahoo.com accounts where one gets my automated mail and the other does not.

shawjames

Thanks, I will check it out and see what I can come up with. It has been an issue for a few years.

Currently, all @aol.com and @.com users are not receiving any emails. Some others get missed as well, but usually due to some spam protection.

MarkR

AOL have their own policy on accepting mail, which is:

We don't accept any mail if we don't like it

They occasionally publish a subset of their rules.

If your mail is being rejected by a lot of hosts, it's likely that one or more of:

It is not formatted correctly in some respect
It contains something which looks a lot like spam
Your machine IP address is on a blacklist
Some of the headers you or your MTA are adding, are incorrect. This could be, the "From:" header, or the envelope sending being an incorrect email address (e.g. nonexistent domain, or domain that you don't have permission to send mail for)

Look at your MTA's error log! this is the only way.

Unfortunately, if you use MS IIS SMTP server, it doesn't make an error log (typically unhelpful). To find out what the problem is here, you will probably have to use a sniffer to watch the SMTP communication.

Mark