can't send email to hotmail!!

[boombanguk]

This is driving me crazy. I've just finished my new Flash game with a "send a friend" option (that i've used before with no problems), and now I find it will not send the email to a hotmail account (not even going to junk, just not getting it at all). I always do a back up email to my own domains email and that goes through fine, just nothing to hotmail.

I've looked around the internet, and found lots of stuff that makes no sense to me including headers etc, anyway I tried using all different ways including..

mail($ToName." <".$ToEmail.">",$ToSubject, $Message, "From: ".$message3." <".$FromEmail.">");

and..

mail($ToName, $ToSubject, $Message2, "From: ".$message3."", "-f".$message3."");

and finally

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: CHWMFL <[e-mail]>' . "\r\n";
$email = '[e-mail]';
$subject = "CHWMFL Scores Posted";

mail($email, $subject, $Message3,"From: CHWMFL <[e-mail]>\n X-Mailer: PHP/" . phpversion());

I'm afriad I don't know much about the above code, so there might be errors in it.

Anyone got some nice simple php email code the I can use that works with hotmail?? as I can't release my game until this problem is solved!

thanks for any advice!!

regards
boombanguk

[MarkR]

Have a look at your MTA logs and/or the bounce messages. These should indicate why hotmail didn't accept the message.

More than likely it's because either your message is malformed in some way, such as claiming to come from a malformed or unauthorised domain in either its envelope sender or "From" header.

Another possibility is that the host is blacklisted in some way; these can be tricky to remove.

If you try sending to AOL you'll have similar problems I imagine, given that AOL have an extremely ludicrous email policy even compared with hotmail, which basically boils down to "We may choose not to accept messages from you for our own reasons which are secret and non-neogtiable". However, they have improved things recently (e.g. documenting some of these reasons and allowing you to add your server to their list of ones legitimately sending some bulk emails).

Mark

[boombanguk]

"MTA logs and/or the bounce " what is that and how do I do that? sorry I'm an expert in actionscript but noob at this email stuff!

I don't care about AOL, but hotmail is needed as there will be a lot of hotmail users that will play my game.

Can you post some php code, which you know for a fact works for sending emails to hotmail? at least that way I know I have something that should work.

[MarkR]

Ok, look at the logs for your mail transfer agent software, and the bounce messages (when you send a message which doesn't arrive, it will usually bounce).

The bounces are probably going to some system account- contact your systems administrator for more details (If you're on shared hosting, you may have a problem).

The MTA logs will be created by your MTA software, e.g. sendmail. These will probably only be accessible by your systems administrator - contact them to get copies. It's likely that some information about the delivery / non-delivery of messages will be contained therein.

Normally a MTA will send an error message to the sender (envelope-sender) and the logs as well.

To change the envelope sender of a message, you may be able to use the additional options "-f [e-mail]" on the sendmail command line, as specified by the 5th parameter of the mail() function. Contact your systems administrator for more details.

Mark