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AOL Email problems

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:36 am
by mccommunity
I have an email script that will send out emails.. this works great for everyone except aol users. They never get the message anyone know why or if I need to ad different headers or syntax? Thanks here is my code:



/* recipients */
$to = "$email"; // who is the email going to

/* subject */
$subject = "Value Add Report";

/* From */
$from = "info@abccompany.com";

/* To send HTML mail, you can set the Content-type header. */
$headers = "From: $from\r\n";
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

/* and now mail it */
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

$email_status = '<font color=red><center><B>Email Has Been Sent.</B></center></font>';

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:45 am
by microthick
AOL spam control is pretty stringent about who gets to send mail through.

There was a recent thread about this same topic and no solution was found.

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:47 am
by aquila125
try this one: http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/

not sure if it works for AOL, but it saved me a lot of time

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:50 am
by Saethyr
I do know that AOL will not accept email from anyone on dynamic IP and/or people who have a mailserver set to open relay, this is a safety measure they use to keep spam to as minimal as possible from people running off DSL and Cable.



Saethyr

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:59 am
by m3mn0n
Well from that thread, the solutions I relized was:

a) Reject forms that have @aol.com emails. And ask the user to use another address.
b) Get my web host's IP on the AOL "white list."

The first is what people should do until a conclusion about the second is made. It will be what you need to do if you're rejected/ignored anyway. :wink:

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 11:04 am
by Saethyr
Try This as well, put in your servers info and it will tell you if there is an error

Manual telnet Test

There are a number of ways to manually perform a mail transaction through telnet. The following procedure should work under a variety of operating systems, including Windows, UNIX and Linux.

This section describes how to manually perform a mail transaction through telnet. If you do not receive the replies shown, copy the entire transaction and save it so that you can report the error you received.

Generally “OK” codes start with 2nn and “Error” codes start with 5nn. An example of an error code would be if you connect to us and receive 554 RTR:SC .... A 5nn error code could indicate a number of problems, for example a syntax error or AOL systems blocking your incoming connections due to lack of RDNS or excessive user complaints.

To manually perform a mail transaction through telnet, perform the following steps:

From a Command prompt, Type:

telnet mailin-01.mx.aol.com 25
This specifies to telnet to port 25 on an AOL mailhost.

220
The mailhost identifies itself. This should be accompanied by several lines of introductory text.


Type:

HELO yourdomainname.com
where yourdomainname.com
specifies your domain.

250
followed by the server you are connecting to.


Type:

MAIL FROM:<you@hostname.com>
where you@hostname.com
indicates the address the mail should appear to be from.

250 is syntactically correct


Type:

RCPT TO:<recipient@aol.com>
where recipient@aol.com
is the recipient’s address.

250 is syntactically correct


Type:

DATA

START MAIL INPUT, END WITH “.” ON A LINE BY ITSELF


Type a brief message, followed by <Enter> . <Enter> (Type a period on a line by itself, then hit ENTER.)

250 OK

Saethyr

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 11:06 am
by microthick
Wow, I wanna try that. :P

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 12:10 pm
by m3mn0n
It bypasses the need to be on the white list? Interesting.

Now to get that within a web application...

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 1:18 am
by microthick
Image

This is what I got when trying to telnet to the address.

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 1:56 am
by m3mn0n
They refuse all dynamic/residential addresses? Ugh. :roll:

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 8:12 am
by Saethyr
Yep!

Anything marked as a dynamic/residential IP, this being for example an SBC DSL or Roadrunner Cable connection they will refuse. This is the way several of the larger providers are going because alot of spammers are using thier connections and a simple mailserver to spam people. Not many ways around this except possibly using your providers outgoing mailserver (i.e. mail.sbc-global.net) to send your PHP mail, but is this possible, is one able to set the SMTP in PHP mail? Guess I will look this up. I will post whatever answer I find up here.


Saethyr "Slave Worker of the Phone Company"