Slashdot Mirror
Sending Mail to Hotmail Users?
Cafesolo wonders: "I'm developing a web application using PHP. It has a user registration system that sends a link via email to activate new accounts. I've found that sending mails to Hotmail accounts is very difficult, because the spam filter is very strong and it filters lots of non-junk messages. I think the spam filter blocks any email whose domain isn't in an internal whitelist (which might contain popular domains, like hotmail.com itself, gmail.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, etc). Most of my users have Hotmail emails. I can't simply tell my users to read the junk folder because most of them are not computer-savvy and that seems to be a bit confusing to them. Has anyone managed to solve this problem? Did somebody try to contact Microsoft? Is there any way to get whitelisted? Can an independent programmer get his domain whitelisted?"
Also, have you tried sending the email spoofing the receivers email address?
Never do this. Forging the return address is one of the few things that actually is illegal.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Welcome to my world. I work on email deliverability for a financial services company, so no, I'm not a spammer. Hotmail makes two tools available to you to help you get your email delivered:
MSN Smart Network Data Services: http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/
This will let you put in your SMTP's IP address and it will give you consolidated stats on how much mail was received, and how much was filtered as spam.
Sender Score Certified: http://www.senderscorecertified.com/
This company will "certify" you as a safe sender, and Hotmail will let your emails in unfiltered. The catch is you have to pay for this.
Good luck. It isn't easy, but at least there are some tools at your use.
I've run into this same sort of problem, and I've discovered that spoofing the from address is a really, really bad idea; there's a sizable chunk of mailservers that will reverse DNS the IP address they're receiving the email from, and if it doesn't match the domain in the from address, they'll reject it.
Grab something like SpamAssassin, and set it up to add headers telling you what rules have been triggered. Then send an email from your web application to that account, and examine the headers. While Hotmail probably don't use the exact same rules as SpamAssassin, it's an easy way to spot obvious stuff for you to fix. For example, using too much HTML, particular phrases, too many capital letters, being on blacklists, etc, can all be remedied by you without Microsoft's involvement.
I also seem to remember that Hotmail strongly discriminates against senders who don't have SPF set up, so it's probably a good idea to enable that for your domain.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
My domain has a SPF record and I never had issues sending email to anyone on hotmail or other services.
c hnologies/senderid/wizard/
See:
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/te
&
http://openspf.org/wizard.html
You sound like you're making some very large assumptions about what's actually triggering the spam filters at hotmail. What makes you think it's your domain, and not the crappy MTA you're using? Spammers often use non-standard MTAs that anti-spam programs have learned to identify through header analysis. Have you tested sending mail from a standard mailer like sendmail or postfix to a hotmail account? You obviously need to confirm what's actually causing hotmail to tag your mail as spam and stop making assumptions.
AccountKiller
Get yourself a hotmail account and have PHP fire off e-mails to it. Tweak as needed until you get one through that's not marked as spam.
I've noticed that Hotmail is very particular about the headers you send along with the message. If you send the message as a content-type: text/plain and specify a valid Message-ID, it should get through. Here is what I use for extra headers:
."Message-ID: \r\n";
$PlainMailHeaders= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n"
. "Content-Type: text/plain\r\n"
. "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\r\n"
Hope it helps.
My hotmail inbox seems to only get mail about c14lis and v14gra. Perhaps you should use these keywords in your mail to help it get through?
Falsifying headers is illegal, but I doubt anyone will actually pursue a small-time website operator who's sending otherwise legitimate traffic.
But for many of us forging headers is an automatic death sentence. I've walked away from existing business relationships where I had non-refundable credits because a customer support request was answered with a forged header.
On the other side of the table, it's one of the few actions where I would not hestiate to recommend immediate termination for cause if I caught a member of our staff pulling that stunt. (The other actions are using the computers to perform illegal acts or to distribute pr0n/warez.)
The reason it's so serious? It shows a culture that has a casual disregard to the consequences of identity fraud. If you forge mail that appears to come from me, then who else are you sending those forged messages to? Why should I believe your answer? Trust, once lost, is not easily recovered.
(BTW this doesn't even address the original point of getting past spam filters. Like many sites I have my MTA set up to reject incoming messages that claim (in the envelope) to come from my own domains. I know who I am and anyone claiming to be 'me' is, prima facie, making fradulent claims and should be treated accordingly. The last time I checked that test, by itself, was blocking about a third of inbound traffic.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
So are you a doctor then?
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
No, but I am a liar.
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