confusing email validation/handling

msn not receiving emails from forms,,yahoo ok

[Roly]

Hi,

I`m putting a form on my site. The form validates the users email address entered(contact info), and wether there is a message entered then sends the message to my inbox. Just to make it simple to contact me.

The email address is validated ok (with javascript regular expression) but my msn hotmail account will not receive all of the emails,,if the email address is unusual(but still valid and possible) the email is not received. It works fine with Yahoo though!

The email is sent using a small PHP script.

Anyone know of this mysterious (to me) behaviour?!

Help appreciated!

thanks,,,Roly.

[Abdelrhman Fahmy]

Hotmail has many spam filters which investigate the Email headers before accepting the email ,one of those filters comparing the original SMTP server of the sender email with the current server that the email coming from, I think if you're using a direct SMTP component hosted by your hosting company then the spam filter will refuse the email ,because the email sender SMTP is diffrent from the original SMTP serve related to the email address
That's may be one of the reasons, and that's called SMTP relaying email.about.com/library/weekly/aa100697.htm
You may sticky mail me sample of the addresses if you want more reasons :)

[Sanenet]

Set the "from" email to be something unique (like [e-mail]), send it off to msn.com, check in the junk folder and mark it as "not junk email".

[Roly]

hi,,thanks for your reply,,

i`m just using a form,,then use the `mail` function in PHP to pass the form onto me via email.The form is not sent from an email account as such-just from the hosting company.

Hotmail seems to only accept the mail if the user enters a common email address(the user enters their email address on the form in the `your email` text box),,but I`m aware some users do have rather unusual email addresses,,,so i`m thinking of just having the emails sent to my yahoo account-receives them fine.

It`s not as if i`m actually using an email account to pass on the email,,so i`m not sure why it would have this header information? Hotmail must be quite complex.

cheers from Roly.

[Roly]

Thanks sanenet thats a great way to tackle it-just understood you!

Is this the professional method? Though it seems the best way to tackle it.

Cheers from Roly.