PHP mail not working for AOL email addresses?

[MaverickMT]

Hi. I've been using the mail() function of php to send out membership confirmation emails..and I've been hearing from people with @aol.com addresses that they just never get the messages. Is this just something with mail() ? Has this happened to anyone else; what can I do to fix it? Thanks in advance

[Nightfire]

maybe the email address you're using? we can't work by guessing to solve your problem, especially when there's no error.

Try posting what/how your emails is being sent

[Spookster]

This won't be a problem with PHP. The problem will be with your web host's mail server. Sometimes web hosts get blacklisted by Internet providers such as AOL. If AOL customers were receiving spam from your web hosts mail server then AOL may have decided to block all mail coming from your web host. You should contact your web host about this.

[Jason]

should you contact your web host or should you contact AOL? It sounds like AOL are being the stupid ones and they should be the ones that get contacted and yelled at for blockeing all domain names with the ?????? (whatever is being used).


Jason

[Spookster]

Originally posted by Jason
should you contact your web host or should you contact AOL? It sounds like AOL are being the stupid ones and they should be the ones that get contacted and yelled at for blockeing all domain names with the ?????? (whatever is being used).


Jason

It is better to contact your host and have them contact the Internet provider. You do not own the email server, your host does.

My host got blacklisted by AOL and are still battling with AOL to get removed.

[MaverickMT]

agh...thanks, guys. It looks like (guessing) my server got blacklisted by AOL. I'll work around it by not allowing AOL emails and putting links to sign up at hotmail/yahoo/etc. I probably can't afford to wait for AOL & business diplomacy to work out. Thanks again

[MaverickMT]

heh oh yeah, looks like I got around this one. lol. Thru analysis of email headers, i found that if you add this to your headers:

"\r\nReturn-Path:somemail@server.com"

with the \r\n being if you have to make a new line, and somemail@server.com probably being anything, it'll work. I tried it out w/an AOL account. Here's how I arrived at this.

My site is magictutorial.com, with the host icdsoft.com and their server being station175.com. So I analyzed an email coming from the php mail() function, which had the "Return-Path: root@station175.com". I then looked at the headers of the webmaster, who uses a php mail interface to do web mail from ICDSoft's member control panel. Both emails, from the webmaster and from the php mail, come off the server, so I looked for the most clear piece of evidence that differentiated the two in the email headers. And that's it. Enjoy

[MaverickMT]

turns out the webmaster just got this email, like a minute after my experiments worked:

~~~~~~~~~~

Hello,

We had some problems with AOL recently, but they where resolved and you should be able to send emails to AOL users at the time being.

Could you please try sending out some test emails from your domain name to AOL email address.

If you are still having troubles please contact us again.

Best Regards,
Support

~~~~~~~~~~

so i'm not sure if i fixed the problem myself heh - probably not, but food for thought. With that rhyme, i'm out -_-

[nightmare5liter]

I was having problems with aol not getting mail from my php form.


From PHP documentation mail function
additional_parameters (optional)
The additional_parameters parameter can be used to pass an additional parameter to the program configured to use when sending mail using the sendmail_path configuration setting. For example, this can be used to set the envelope sender address when using sendmail with the -f sendmail option.

The user that the webserver runs as should be added as a trusted user to the sendmail configuration to prevent a 'X-Warning' header from being added to the message when the envelope sender (-f) is set using this method. For sendmail users, this file is /etc/mail/trusted-users.


mail('$recipient, $subject, $body, "From: \"mail@example.com\", "-fmail@example.com")

where -fmail@example.com is the optional additional parameter.

I did not include the Return-path header but the headers show mail@example.com as the return path.

[phattymatty]

The previous post was genius... fixed the problem right away. Great call nightmare5liter! That additional header has been such a problem, nagging like a thorn in my side. Bless you kind sir!:thumbsup: