Web Email Undeliverable to AOL.COM Accounts

[iloveu]

We use web form to generate emails when customer wants to contact us. Our order confirmation is emailed to customer automatically after we receive the payment.

Recently, customers complain that they can not get in touch with us through online email form (we actually don't receive email from these customers). And they don't receive any order confirmation from us either, just a error notice of undeliverable email.

We double check our record and find all complaining customers use email address @ aol.com. If we put aol.com email address as FROM address in our program, then the email won't be sent. We have no problem with other email address, such as hotmail.com, gmail.com...

Anybody has similar problem?

[piatkow]

Can we clarify?
As I read your post, you are sending a mail from your web site to yourself with the customer's email address spoofed as the "from" address.

Correct?

[iloveu]

Let me clarify:

Customer sends an email to contact us on our website through web form, and the from address is customer's own email address as he/she typed. The site is designed in this way because we use outlook express, we can easily reply email from customer by just clicking "Reply" button.

If it is so called "spoof", I think it is probably the reason of "undeliverability" by aol.com. I know "spoof" is not correct, we can change the from address to our email, but it won't be convenient for us to reply inquiry emails through outlook express (we have to change To address manually one by one).

Do you have any thought to improve?

[Corey Bryant]

You might see if you can get whitelisted for AOL - postmaster.info.aol.com should help you out.

-Corey

[iloveu]

Thanks for your information, Cory.

But we find the problem just happens when customer emails to us through our online email function and type an AOL.com email as FROM address. We are able to send email to customer with aol.com address through Outlook Express and customer receives the email, customer can email us directly from his aol account and we receive the emails.

Want to make sure of it before I go to request to be whitelisted.

[jbinbpt]

Is there any error message displayed such as "Unauthorized relay msg"?

[Corey Bryant]

Can you maybe whitelist the server IP on your email server to bypass any authentication? This might help. Your server might be checking the aol.com email against the server's IP and since they do not match, the email server is saying it is spam

-Corey

[minnapple]

aol rejects any email that has html formatting,

[Key_Master]

Since the problem seems to only occur through your server, try punch your server IP into the following tool to see if it has reverse DNS:

[postmaster.aol.com...]