Mails not sending to outlook, hotmail - php

I have my site hosted on bluehost which sends out daily mails to customers (with cron jobs). All mails are working fine except outlook and hotmail. Customers are not getting emails on their outlook/hotmail accounts. I checked the code and it working properly, returning true with php mail function.
MX records on hosting are set to gmail, bluehost supports says its a code issue or I need to consult with google but when I send direct mail through gmail account customers are getting them.
I am not sure how to debug and resolve this issue. Can someone suggest me the ways to resolve this or the possible reason behind this.

I know this is a few months later, but maybe I can help. I fought with this for a while. It depends on the mailer you're using, and your code a bit so it would be best to post it here.
Overall though, outlook and hotmail have extremely high spam filters, so there's a list of things you need to consider.
First - I've heard third party mailers will get blacklisted or blocked pretty quickly (check their reviews), so check that the IP address hasn't been blacklisted. You can contact outlook to do this (good luck), or send yourself an e-mail, find your ip in the header of your e-mail, and check a blacklist checker online somewhere.
Second - As part of USA's CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, you need to provide some sort of unsubscribe link as well to be in the good books.
Third - If you are using phpMailer or something along those lines, you'll need to remove anything that looks like this:
$mail->AddReplyTo("youremail#domain.com");
$mail->From = "youremail# domain.com";
Because that will get it marked as spam.
Fourth - If you end up trying to send your e-mails through your gmail instead, allow access to third party apps, then go here (https://accounts.google.com/b/0/DisplayUnlockCaptcha), it will show up in your hotmail just fine.
Be warned that if you test your hotmail too often with the same message, it'll get blocked again.
Hopefully this helps!

Related

Properly signed phpmailer emails keep being marked as spam or get rejected

For the past 2 months I have been struggling with the mailserver for a webapplication I'm building. Mails kept being marked as spam or didn't even arrive at a recipient at all.
I started researching this fairly common problem and found out about all the things that come with signing email en authenticating mailservers and so on. I even had to move my domain name to another hosting provider just so I could setup my dkim, spf and dmarc records correctly.
After doing all of this mail-tester gave me the following results:
I figured this would be good enough so I started testing some more. Only to find out that gmail still marks my emails as spam, and outlook (hotmail etc.) still doesn't even receive the email's in any folder.
Since I don't know what to try anymore, i am hopeful someone here would have some suggestions for me.
Thanks in advance!
That mail tester is really basic it doesn't give you a realistic picture of whats really going on.
You should test with the one from Unlock The Inbox. It does well over 400+ different checks, depending on what you have configured.

Prevent PHPMailer email going to Hotmail Junk Folder

I have created a mailing software using PHPmailer. Everything is working ok apart from emails are going to Hotmail junk folder. Yahoo, Gmail, Aol and other domains are receiving the emails but not Hotmail.
I have set SPF on my hosting for the domain which I am sending the email from and When I check the source of the email on Hotmail, it shows this:
Authentication-Results: hotmail.com; spf=pass.
The emails I am sending is not classified as spam as I get it checked with some online tools. I also tried sending test emails as if I am sending an email to a friend. Still no luck
Has anyona any idea if there is anything else I should do?
Note1:I have checked other posts on here but I couldnt find an answer so I am posting my own with my own details.
Note2: I have also tried sending Gmail SMTP and still emails are going to junk folder.
Note3: I have also tried the hosting company email domain to send but still it goes into junk mail.
Thanks in advance.
Take a good look at the email headers on the receiving hotmail account. There will be clues as to why you're email is being classified as junk.
Take a look at this article.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn205071(v=exchg.150).aspx
You're looking for two header fields called
X-Forefront-Antispam-Report
X-Microsoft-Antispam
You're going to see a BCL, PCL, SRV with a colon after it and a value, depends on what those values are will be your clues as to why you're hitting the spam folder.
Without posting the full header, their's little information anyone is going provide other then telling you to try this and that. I'm a big proponent of telling people to use this mail tester, because it's the best around, but no mail testing program is going to solve every problem, but they are a good start.
Getting around email spam filters (as a legitimate sender) is a complicated issue.
Personally I recommend using Mailgun, Sparkpost, or another email service.
These guarantee delivery and most are free for the scale you'll be operating at. I personally recommend mailgun.

Magento email sent to spam

I'm runnning an online store using Magento on a VPS I own with a dedicated IP address.
The problem I'm facing is that all emails are sent to SPAM.
I've read that shared servers / IPs can have problems and be flagged as SPAM but I believe my case is different.
When the email is sent, in the email header, I get something like: "Sent from example#mydomain.com through strange.server.name.com" like what happens for codewars.com emails (Codewars info#codewars.com through mail130.wdc02.mcdlv.net). Gmail sends the emails from my domain to SPAM but for codewars, to the inbox, so there is no problem in this.
What do I need to configure (in Magento and/or server) to solve this? I don't use any tool like cpanel...
We worked around this issue by first by configuring postfix correctly (take a look at your /etc/postfix files). The problem areas you should look for is the myhostname, myorigin and other local delivery maps if there are any.
Doing this, did work for us for a little bit (like a few weeks). However what gave us a more permanent solution was to move our outgoing mail (SMTP) via services like mailgun. There are tons of options including Google Apps for Business.

Using phpmailer to send to fake email addresses

I am working on a bulk email class for a project and am using Amazon's SES smtp via phpmailer. I am trying to figure out a way to test sending multiple emails without getting blacklisted, spam blocked or blocked by the host. I would ideally like to test anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 separate sendings. Ideally I would send test submissions to dummy addresses.
I know there are services such as http://tempinbox.com/
or
http://www.fakeinbox.com/
But what I would like is a reliable trusted service for testing bulk mailings without using my own personal email addresses.
Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, could you please point me in the right direction. Or let me know if this questions is better posted elsewhere. Thanks in advance.
Regards
If it was me I would setup a new domain (or use an existing one), and setup a catch-all account. That way you can send emails to test1#mydomain.com, test2#mydomain.com, test3#mydomain.com etc and you don't have to actually setup all those email accounts.
I actually do this with one of the domains I own, but more in the order of 200-300 separate accounts, not 40000.
All the emails will be directed into a single mailbox using this method.
Most likely, you are going to have to throttle the outgoing pace to 5/second if I remember correctly for AWS-SES (or AWS will do it for you and not gracefully).
Use a gmail address and the plus (+) sign after your email address with an extra identifier. For example, if your gmail account is
spamtester#gmail.com
send your test emails to
spamtester+1#gmail.com
spamtester+2#gmail.com
spamtester+3#gmail.com
...etc
They'll probably all end up in your spam folder, but you can whitelist them or just look in Spam to see them.
Brian
Reference: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-from-your.html
I am sure there are many of companies providing such services. The principle is, that your mail queue is going to the service company's main server, from where it is then distributed across many mail servers that company has in their cloud and from there it is being physically sent. That ensures your emails are delivered and servers that sent them are not blacklisted, because of the distribution. Unfortunately I do not have links, but sure uncle google will have some answers. Hope this helps a bit. Cheers.

Codeigniter emails not being received by gmail

I have an app where i'm sending emails on certain events, but when i used my gmail account, i never receive the emails and they are not in my spam folder. When i send them to my work email, i receive them instantaneously.
What do i need to do to get the emails through to google?
I'm using the standard codeigniter email configs (which i think uses sendmail).
I'm using google apps for business and i have the MX records setup that google provides.
Do i need anything else? Also, i'm using subdomains in my app, does that affect what i may need to setup?
EDIT
When i use smtp like this example Sending email with gmail smtp with codeigniter email library, the page never seems to come back. It eventually just timesout.
The only plausible explanation for this behaviour is a SPF Check failure. SPF or Sender Policy Framework is a new technology that allows easy detection of spam. Gmail honours SPF unless you manually mark those emails as not spam. Regardless of this, if you have received emails on another address then they must have reached Gmail too. Check your spam thoroughly, as Gmail does not discard emails even on very high spam suspicion rather they end up in the Spam folder.
You can set up a SPF that allows your webserver to send emails which will result in Gmail accepting emails sent by your webserver as authentic. See http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-set-up-and-create-sender-policy-framework-spf-domain-dns-txt-record-with-wizard/ and a wizard from Microsoft.
You will probably see, that at some point in the future, you'll get them all appearing in Gmail. Google is most likely seeing if the sender is spam, and holding those messages. I've experienced that before setting up dev servers. I would suggest using a transactional email service, like Mandrill or SendGrid. You'll find you get a lot of info from those services that you forgo if you simply send an email through PHP.
The Filter Theory The other possibility is that the poster has a filter set up on their GMail account that is filtering out the emails.
I would make sure that you are sending the required header information as well. Have you tried registering a new gmail account and sending it to that user?

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