PHP Registration Emails marked as Spam

emails spam php

[popcorn162]

I have a "friendster" type website that sends out an email notification after a visitor has signed up. Visitors have to click on the link in the email notification in order to verify the membership. Unfortunately, most of my visitors aren't getting those emails because they end up in their spam folder.

Competitors, such as Myspace, Friendster, Hi5, etc. are able to avoid the spam problem. What are they doing differently? My site is built in PHP. So are my competitors' websites. Can someone offer a solution?

If this isn't the correct Category to be posting in, tell me which is?

Thanks in advance.

[Frank_Rizzo]

I think you need to find out why your setup looks 'spammy'. How is the wording of the message? Are you on a shared host which has / is blacklisted by some?

What is identifying your messages as spam? A third party spam product (mailwasher etc.) or is their ISP flagging the possible spam flag and the email client is junking it?

Could it be that those working sites are using SPF and you are not?

[spf.pobox.com...]

[popcorn162]

hi.

I have my site hosted with 1and1.com. It's a shared hosting account. How do I know whether or hosting provider has been blacklisted?

I tried using the EXACT same messages my competitors use, but my emails still get marked as spam. My competitors' emails don't get marked as spam.

What software should I use to find out why my site's registration emails are being marked as spam?

[Longhaired Genius]

Go to DNS Stuff and enter the IP address of the server that is sending your mail into the spam database lookup box to see if your server is on any blacklists. Some are easy to get off, some are more difficult.

[coopster]

I would guess that it has something to do with your mail headers as opposed to anything else, including SPF. I have not embraced nor employed SPF on any sites and have not had a single issue with email.

I would start analyzing the mail headers, here is a thread to give you a head start ...

[webmasterworld.com...]

and don't forget the PHP manual pages for mail [php.net]. The link to RFC2822 is also a very important reference to anybody sending mail. It's tough to read and understand RFC's at first, but they drive everything so it's best to try.

[jatar_k]

we also took spamassassin and ran all of our outbound emails through it to find out what it gave as the X-Spam-Status. We reworded and trimmed all of our emails until each one received a 0 rating.

We fixed SPF and all reverse lookups etc for our mail servers.

We still get some burned. Remember some of those companies could also pay to be on ISP whitelists, I don't know that happens but it seems foolish and naive to think it doesn't.

There are entirely too many variables involved to get everything through. client side tools are the biggest culprit, I get everything through the ISP filters but that doesn't mean they all get to the client.

[kamkaz]

if your script sends mail as: [e-mail] and the machine that you are hosting on does not reslove as bar.com it will be marked as spam. What you have to do ( for most mail servers) is put the the script on bar.com