Mail problem when sending to AOL

People get my mails except when they have an aol.com address

[EricGen]

Hi,

I have a script that sends a mail to customers of the site. It seems that everybody gets it except people with AOL. To send the mail I do:

$headers = "From: Mydomain <[e-mail]>\r\n"; 
$headers .= "X-Sender: <[e-mail]>\r\n"; 
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n"; 
$headers .= "X-Priority: 1\r\n"; 
$headers .= "Return-Path: <[e-mail]>\r\n"; 
... 
mail($to, $subject, $out, $headers);  

Could it be some anti spam or something like that? If so what can I do? I use these to send order confirmations and passwords, so they're not spam.

Thanks

[edit_g]

With the new AOL 8, users have to add your address to an individual "white list" before emails can be recieved.

If you send a lot of mail to AOL users, or if you work with them in any kind of partnership capacity then get onto their technical department, because there is a global white list which you can be added to (there are some quite strict criteria to be met).

If they won't listen to you then buy some paid advertising or PPC with them and say: "why should I advertise on your site when your users can't even get my emails confirming a sale?".

[jamesa]

That's good to know edit_g!

EricGen, I think AOL is doing reverse IP lookups so check your DNS settings if you're running your own DNS. In otherwords when they lookup your IP address it should return a valid domain name.

[edit_g]

In otherwords when they lookup your IP address it should return a valid domain name.

This is one of the requirements for whitelisting as well.

[EricGen]

As far as I know, the IP returned should point to my domain, unless there are some php options to setup? Basically the script executing this is in my domain so that should be OK?

As for white list I am waiting for confirmation from the users in AOL

[patrixs]

There mite be more that I don't know of but the only thing I know is that this funtion works great for me!

function SEND_HTML_MAIL($mail_info) {
$from_name = $mail_info["from_name"];
$from_address = $mail_info["from_address"];

$to_name = $mail_info["to_name"];
$to_address = $mail_info["to_name"]." <".$mail_info["to_address"].">";

$message = $mail_info["message"];
$subject = $mail_info["subject"];

$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers .= "From: ".$from_name." <".$from_address.">\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: ".$from_name." <".$from_address.">\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Priority: 3\r\n";
$headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: Normal\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: iCEx Networks HTML-Mailer v1.0";

mail($to_address, $subject, $message, $headers);
}

to send mail just do this :
$mail_info["from_name"] = "FROM_NAME";
$mail_info["from_address"] = "FROM_ADDRESS";
$mail_info["to_name"] = "TO_NAME";
$mail_info["to_address"] = "TO_ADDRESS";
$mail_info["message"] = "HTML MESSAGE";
$mail_info["subject"] = "SUBJECT";
SEND_HTML_MAIL($mail_info);

if some bulk mails filter is deleting your message you can change the following :
$headers .= "X-Priority: 3\r\n";
$headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: Normal\r\n";
to :
$headers .= "X-Priority: 1\r\n";
$headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: High\r\n";

For plain text change :
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
to :
$headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";