I am using the default set up of send mail in a CentOS box and I have an php application that uses the PHP mail function. For past few days while testing, I see that the mails from this application are in the SPAM box. I tested it with gmail and hotmail, it is the same in both cases.
Do I have to modify or change something in Sendmail configuration to make sure the mail is from an authentic server? I read from somewhere that if we send emails from unreachable hosts it will be marked as SPAM...but I do remember the mails were reaching INBOX initially and only past few days it is marked as spam.
Any advises or pointers on this would be greatly helpful.
I had similar problem while sending mails using php mail i resolved this by including header argument in the code
<?
$header="-F 'Webmaster' -f support#yourdomain.com";
mail("recipient#recipient-domain.com", "Test Message", "This is my message.", $header);
?>
Related
My client uses Exchange Active Sync (EAS) to communicate with the exchange server. When I reply to an email (SendMail), I do not get the correct LastVerbExecuted parameter from the server. My question is, is client supposed to set this field and send it as a part of the Change command or server should do that for me?
Just to add, when OWA is used to reply to some email, it seems to have set the LastVerbExecuted just fine on the server. However, when I sent an email from my client it does not seem to be working and the server does not send the LastVerbExecuted as 'ReplyToSender'.
Can anyone help me discover the issue?
Edit: I suppose the problem is with my client not sending any element in SendMail command request which will help the server to identify which email is being responded to. So now my actual question is, which element can be used in SendMail command to send the identity of the actual email (which is replied to)?
So I was able to get it confirmed from microsoft that lastverbexecuted is only available with SmartReply and SmartForward commands:
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/d0fab280-0036-40f4-830a-00c748573f7f/lastverbexecuted-when-using-smartreply-with-exchange-2010-is-wrong?forum=os_exchangeprotocols
Quote from the article:
"We have concluded our investigation in to this issue and it has been determined that the LastVerbExecuted element will ONLY be updated with the use of the SmartReply and SmartForward commands. There is not currently a way to use the SendMail command and have it update the LastVerbExecuted."
My iOS application uses Mailcore to access a user's email account. Sending and receiving is done via SMTP and IMAP, and both processes work as expected for Gmail and Outlook (which both use OAuth for login).
I just added Yahoo (as well as some other providers to the app who do not use OAuth) and for all of these providers I am having an issue specifically with sending messages.
The issue is that although messages DO get sent successfully from my application, they do not appear in the sent folder on the web for the provider.
For example, if I log into my Yahoo account in my application, and send a message to my Gmail account, the message appears in my Gmail inbox on the web, but not in my Yahoo sent box on the web.
I tried adding Yahoo to the regular mail app on iPhone and sending a message from this account - this worked fine - the message shows up Yahoo sent box on the web. So, I then compared the headers of the two messages (the one sent from mail app and the one sent from my app) and the only obvious difference I see is in the line 'X-Rocket-Received':
Mail App:
X-Rocket-Received: from [11.180.250.219] (userName#71.208.72.234 with xymcookie [216.39.61.254])
by smtp203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com with SMTP; 23 May 2014 08:19:54 -0700 PDT
My App:
X-Rocket-Received: from (userName#118.41.27.139 with plain [98.138.105.21])
by smtp214.mail.ne1.yahoo.com with SMTP; 23 May 2014 08:58:29 -0700 PDT
Can anyone answer any of the following questions for me:
1) What does X-Rocket-Received mean?
2) What is the significance of "with xymcookie" versus "with plain"?
3) Is my issue likely to do with my not having an xymcookie?
4) Where might I begin to solve this issue?
Many thanks.
Additional information:
It was placed there by some server along the way. It is a non-standard header. It appears similar to a standard SMTP Received header though.
'xymcookie' is a non-standard authentication method used by Yahoo. It is not, as far as I can tell, publicly documented.
No.
See Remy's answer. Use IMAP Append for most servers. Gmail does not require it, but that is non-standard.
Sending an email with SMTP directly does not put the email in the provider's Sent folder. You have to log into the provider with IMAP and put a copy of the email into the Sent folder as a separate operation. Higher level apps, like iPhone's mail app, handle these details internally.
is there any way i install SMTP service on my Linux server and use php to send emails through it ?
so that emails doesn't show up as spam ?
maybe through ssl ?
my mail() function is perfect , with perfect headers , but still sending to spam :(
Thanks .
Cross-posting myself from another answer:
A few bullet points (Assuming that mail() returns true and there are no errors in the error log) :
Does the sender address ("From") belong to a domain on your server? If not, make it so.
Is your server on a blacklist (e.g. check IP on spamhaus.org)? This is a remote possibility with shared hosting.
Are mails filtered by a spam filter? Open an account with a freemailer that has a spam folder and find out. Also, try sending mail to an address without a spam filter.
Do you possibly need the fifth parameter "-f" of mail() to add a sender address? (See mail() command in the PHP manual)
If you have access to log files, check those, of course, as suggested above.
Do you check the "from:" address for possible bounce mails ("Returned to sender")? You can also set up a separate "errors-to" address.
There are plenty of variables that could potentially be involved here.
Your idea of a perfect header seems subjective. I would recommend you use something like PHPMailer or Swiftmailer to handle your mailing needs.
Some other variables you might need to take into account are the processing of bounced emails, and making sure you send your mail in chunks as opposed to one big send off.
You can recheck your headers, maybe there might a space or something in the header from address, you can also check if the ip of your server is blacklisted (http://www.anti-abuse.org/multi-rbl-check/)
I've got a PHP app with an invitation system where users can invite other users to try the service. Internally we use google apps for our domain to send/receive emails (mydomain.com).
1) My question is, can I send emails from my server with the from address being invite#mydomain.com? I am worried about the emails being blocked/ignored by the destination server. I am aware that it is possible to send the emails by configuring my php installation to use google smtp server, but there is a limit of 500 emails a day, which is not very scalable.
I don't really know that much about sending emails and why/how they are blocked/considered spam. I'd appreciate any good advice/tips you can give me.
2) What is a good way to test to see if the email portion of my app is working without installing it on my live server. Can I just setup an smtp server on my desktop and send mails this way? Can you recommend any other good ideas for testing. I'll basically be sending just a few emails to my personal webmail accounts to make sure that everything works.
Thanks,
Bill
1) My question is, can I send emails
from my server with the from address
being invite#mydomain.com? I am
worried about the emails being
blocked/ignored by the destination
server. I am aware that it is possible
to send the emails by configuring my
php installation to use google smtp
server, but there is a limit of 500
emails a day, which is not very
scalable.
I don't really know that much about
sending emails and why/how they are
blocked/considered spam. I'd
appreciate any good advice/tips you
can give me.
There is a way track if mail has been bounced (there are more than 10 possible bounce reasons!). You can set the return-path header in your outgoing emails. Best practice is to specify a different mail address in the return-path. When e-mails are getting bounced for whatever reason, a notification will be sent to this address. Additionally you can have for example a (PHP) cron job that connects using IMAP to the bounced email account and do something with the bounced e-mails. This is a pretty reliable way to track the status of your sent emails.
Additionally, in order to minimize the chance your e-mail will get blacklisted you could think about signing your e-mails using a certificate (you can get one for free for personal usage. A commercial one may cost you around 25 dollars a year)
2) What is a good way to test to see
if the email portion of my app is
working without installing it on my
live server. Can I just setup an smtp
server on my desktop and send mails
this way? Can you recommend any other
good ideas for testing. I'll basically
be sending just a few emails to my
personal webmail accounts to make sure
that everything works.
You can actually send a test email from everywhere as long as the outgoing SMTP port (25) is not blocked. If you have an own smtp server with username/passwd authentication enabled, you will be able to send e-mails from everywhere using the these credentials/settings. In all other cases, you will have to use the smtp of your internet provider to send emails.
To address the second part (as Eric pointed out, you'll have better luck at serverfault.com with the first part), any locally hosted SMTP server should be able to do the trick, and there are plenty available for any given OS. Google can help you there.
The main thing you'll want from a local SMTP server is detailed logging. It's entirely possible that the local server could fail/refuse to deliver the message to its intended destination for any number of reasons (again, serverfault.com), but that's outside the scope of testing the code's delivery of the email to the SMTP server.
If it does properly forward the test message to you, great. But if it doesn't, you just want to be able to see in the server's logs that it received the message correctly and was able to process it. Whatever that processing accomplished is a separate issue.
For email testing I use Pappercut. It's easy to use but some antivirus may not like you opening port 25.
I use Dumbster for testing. I will catch the emails, then my test code can check the content.
To avoid spam, there are a number of things you have to do, and I'm not sure I've found them all. Make sure that your IP is registered, and that a reverse lookup returns the right domain.
1) Sending:
This is a good article describing some of the pitfalls around sending email http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code.html
Check out the comments too.
2) Testing:
Disclaimer - I work for the company behind the service linked to below.
If you would rather not set up your own smtp server you can use a hosted email testing service like Clickity
You can create as many test email addresses as you like or configure your app to point directly at our smtp server. You can then view the complete email on our site as part of your manual testing or automate the tests it via our API.
Is it possible to retrieve the SMTP response of a mail. For example, I am sending a mail to non existing email id. Surely our server will send us a mailer daemon failure mail to our mail id. I need to capture that failure mail.
How its possible? please explain me. Some time we may enter more than one non existing email id, so i have to retrieve all the failure mail alone for every corresponding emails
Please guide me!
Thanks in advance,
Praveen J
I think I understood your question correctly now. As I understand, you are writing an application to send mail. And in your application, whenever you send a mail, you also want verify that if mail was delivered and also if it was not delivered then you want to get hold of the failure message in your application. Is that how you mean?
Well, if that is how you mean, then I think it is impossible to track the mail status with your apllication code. For instance if you are using java sendMail in your apllication you can only ensure that the send happened from your code successfully(without any send exceptions like java.net.SocketException or javax.mail.MessagingException). But, you can never ensure if the mail really reached the recepient. i.e. you can never track in your application if the mail was rejected due to wrong recepient address or any other error like illegal attachment at receipient mail server or errors like blocked sender id etc.
That is because any such error condition will be communicated by the receipient mail server to the sending mail server the information of which is present in the sent mail's header.
Does that answer your question? (Or did I understand your question correctly? ;-))
I am not sure if I am getting your question right. If you send an email to any non existent address say xxx#gmail.com from your address yyy#yourhost.com, the mail server at gmail.com replies to the mail server at yourhost.com with failure message and reason, with your delivery address and you receive the fialure mail automatically. you don't have to do anything extra in this.
If you are talking about seeing mail headers, then it depends on which client you are using. For instace, if you are using MS outlook, you can right-click on the message and click options and then see internet headers section to get mail headers. If you are using some web based mail then i am sure there will some option to view detailed mail headers.
The bounced messages are going to return to a mailbox. You should be able to configure that mailbox by properly setting the headers on the messages you send out. You would then need to monitor that mailbox, or have that mailbox deliver the messages to your program.
I would suggest you consider using VERP for all messages you send out. It will make it much easier for you to identify which email address a particular bounce belongs too. To do this you would need control of your mail server though. It takes some work configuring things.
To answer the question with more detail you need to tell us how your are sending messages, what type of mail server you are running, and how much control you have over the mail server.
On Unix, you can use "procmail" for this. Procmail is a service which can intercept your mails and process them following rules.
If you can access your mail my IMAP, I suggest to look at the Python module imaplib.