Forum Moderators: phranque
Normally we provide our clients their advice within 24 hrs. We now see more and more that after a couple of days our clients mail us and ask for a refund or explanation why they have not received their service yet.
Very frustrating of course for the clients and for us. It is costing me business as some people don't come back.
I don't send out spam or newsletters from my email address. Maybe 10 to 15 individual emails a day.
Sometimes I have trouble with yahoo, msn or hotmail addresses, but it is not a constant thing.
Can anyone give me advice on how to tackle this problem? I already ask clients for an alternative address when signing up, but not everyone has one.
Thanks already for your help!
As I understand it the email providers will block all emails coming from the same server / IP address, so you are punished for the abuse by others.
I am looking for a either shared hosting but which offers unique IP address, or a dedicated server.
Tim
would different hosting be the solution? I wonder, since the email address itself remains the same. Don't they also look at the address of who send the mail?
There was free tool available for checking this but its now a pay for tool and I don't think I could list the link even if it was still free. anyhow I'd look into and also research getting a SPF record.
The more you legitimize your mail the less likely that it will get dropped or flagged as spam.
One of my servers hosts a gay website (non adult, non porn). No other websites on the same machine. IP address isn't blacklisted and no spam/bulk mail is being sent from this server.
More than 6 months hotmail.com didn't accept any emails with passwords which were sent to the new members of this website. Emails to @hotmail.com just disappeared without bouncing back.
All emails were sent from non-existing address like no-reply@mydomain.com. When I changed "from" address to the existing one, hotmail.com started to accept emails (autimatically putting them in "junk" folder).
At the same time hotmail.com accepts emails from non-exixting addresses which are sent from my other servers. The only difference is the domain name (only emails with word "gay" in the domain name were sent to the blackhole, others were delivered). A few months ago I submitted a support ticket @ Hotmail/Microsoft website, but it doesn't looks that this company is going to send some answer.
I suggest to use SMTP servers instead of PHP mail() function (if you are doing this).
Check if your web server has reverse DNS records - this is very important.
it is also possible that your domain name is blacklisted, but that is unlikely. it can happen if a lot of spammers register on your site and you try to mail them. if it is your domain name that is blacklisted you can only try to find the lists and ask them to take it off.
another possibility and very possible is what was mentioned before by gcan, the way you send mail from your server. we had almost the same problem last week, when we were sending autoated respomses from our server, gmail didnt get it at all and hotmail was getting it, what we did is change the way it was sending from adding a smtp password to sending directly via the server smtp and that solved the problem. we are sending from asp.net (personally i would suggest calling your shared server hosting company and speak to them, normally they tend to say we dont deal with those issues but i am sure you wouldnt be the only one!)
to sumerize:
most likely causes are 1: the way the code sends the email 2: the IP address is blacklisted.
talking about email i do suggest you should get google apps we added it on various domains and it works great for sending and recieving.
