I’ve been struggling all day trying to get a test campaign straight,and I’m about to give up. This is the problem:
emails to hotmail accounts don’t arrive at all, no errors messages from phpList, no returned mail either
emails to gmail accounts always end up as spam
I’ve read and applied most of the tips at http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListPreflight.html (set up the noreply, postmaster, abuse email addresses, set up SPF record). All this doesn’t change the situation: messages to hotmail and gmail don’t show up at all, or not in the inbox. Other domains (yahoo, our own domain) seem to work.
I’ve checked the mail log at our server. The only clue I could find about emails to Hotmail being kept in some queue is this:
Jun 2 16:51:48 rs211454 postfix/smtp[29924]: 5E03ECE00C3: to=<xxx@hotmail.com>, relay=mx3.hotmail.com[207.46.8.199]:25, delay=8.7, delays=0.03/0.01/1.3/7.3, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 <82385255e5169af83caee57c75d8d4c2@kantl.be> Queued mail for delivery)
Could anyone help me please, I’m only trying to find a quick solution, but these are major showstoppers…
According to your log file snippet, the email was delivered and received by hotmail. From that point, you lose control of what happens. I would think that hotmail will provide some kind of feedback if the user does not exist, and will handle the email ‘as it sees fit’, based on the content of the email, what other receivers have done, and the reputation of your ip address or sending identity (dkim).
If you want a quick solution, use phpList.com. phpList.org self-hosting is not going to be a quick solution, it requires time and expertise, or the money to pay for someone else’s
Good luck what ever you decide to do, phpList is awesome in all it’s forms
There is no quick solution that can be given without an analysis of the email you’re sending as well as the system you’re sending from.
In the case of the one you’re showing, hotmail is refusing the email right now, but is allowing you to attempt delivery again.
As far as it being a “Showstopper”… other paid mass mailing solutions would report this as a bounce, and gmail as a normal delivery. If you process bounces properly with those paid solutions, your hotmail address will be expunged, the gmail recipient will never see the email, and you’ll never know. They don’t want you to know because an ignorant client is a blissful client.
The learning curve for mail system architecture is a long road… You might want to consider a Hired Gun to get everything sorted out for you.
PS: Take a stiff drink before you try sending a mass mailing to Comcast addys.
My club has this problem. too. All messages, even automatic requests for confirmation, or “Goodbye from…” are rejected by Microsoft Domains like HotMail, Live, MSN, and Outlook because they will not receive from Internet Address 69.73.155.53. For those members, we tried sending from G-Mail, But that company has started blocking messages from being sent that look like Spam because they have “too many Blind Carbon Copy” addresses. The same message to 1 address will go through, and often with less than 7 or 8 Blind Carbon Copy addresses.
@jimboylan phpList does not use CC or BCC so using phpList should improve things for your club.
Check out the manual for Installing or Sending will be a good place to start.
I personally have similar experience before. Emails not received by GMail, yahoo etc. I found out that it was due to some setting or parameters that need to be updated in your hosting configuration. Contact your hosting provider and ask them to fix this.
Alternatively, like mine, you may want to integrate external SMTP server from the best service provider at 99.9% diliverability rate with a very minimal monthly cost.
emails to hotmail accounts don’t arrive at all, no errors messages from phpList, no returned mail either <
Look for the rejection messages in the mailbox of the “Sender”.
When we tried to send using PHP to HotMail and other MicroSoft addresses, we did get a rejection reply from MicroSoft that was sent to the address we had chosen for PHP to display as the Sender on the “From Line”.
We went to PHP and chose “Send a Campaign”. Tab 1 is “Content”. The 1st blank to enter is “Subject”, the 2nd is “From Line”. It may already be filled in from previous campaign, or with the address of whoever is currently signed in to PHP. Anyhow, whatever is entered here is where rejection and other messages are sent, including real replies from your recipients who just hit “Reply to this E-mail”. The E-mail service or program that address uses may block those messages or treat them as Spam, because it determines that the original message wasn’t sent from it, but was instead sent from PHP. That’s what happened when we entered our own E-mail address in the “From Line” box, but had the replies automatically Forwarded to our G-Mail address…
I used the Send Test feature in PHP to send to myself and 2 HotMail addresses. Previously, I had sent to both from G-mail, and determined that 1 was good and the other no longer in use. A Send Test message is sent twice, once as text and again as HTML, so we got 2 replies from HotMail for each address.
Here is what we got when we sent to the suspected bad address from our G-mail address, followed by the 2 messages we got when we sent the Test Message from PHP. The last pair are the messages we got when we sent the Test Message from PHP to a suspected good address that didn’t generate an error message when sending from G-mail. Notice the various codes are slightly different.
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: ...........@hotmail.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain hotmail.com by mx4.hotmail.com. [65.55.37.104].
The error that the other server returned was:
550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<info@philly…bikeride.org> SIZE=11819:
host mx4.hotmail.com [65.55.33.135]: 550 SC-001 (COL004-MC6F19) Unfortunately, messages from 69.73.155.53 weren’t sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<info@philly…bikeride.org> SIZE=11819:
host mx2.hotmail.com [65.55.92.152]: 550 SC-001 (SNT004-MC2F54) Unfortunately, messages from 69.73.155.53 weren’t sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<info@philly…bikeride.org> SIZE=11807:
host mx4.hotmail.com [65.55.37.120]: 550 SC-001 (COL004-MC4F55) Unfortunately, messages from 69.73.155.53 weren’t sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<info@philly…bikeride.org> SIZE=11807:
host mx2.hotmail.com [65.55.33.135]: 550 SC-001 (COL004-MC6F4) Unfortunately, messages from 69.73.155.53 weren’t sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors
Is this just not ip blocking? Like, they think you (or someone on the same ip) is spam? I am not sure what that would actually look like as I always used phpList.com and never been blocked that way.
I don’t know if we are using PHPlist.org or PHPlist.com. But, campaigns we send using PHPlist to HotMail, Outlook, Live, MSM, etc. addresses are returned by live.com because part of 69.73.155.53 Network is on their Block List. Those same MicroSoft Domains will receive the same messages if sent from other E-mail addresses like G-Mail or CompuServe.
I’m not sure if 69.73.155.53 is the numerical Internet address of our Domain or PHPlist.
Check your IP address and sending domain at www.mxtoolbox.com – check DNS, Blacklists, and MX.
If you have SPF records published in your DNS make sure they are accurately reflecting the sending domain/IP etc. I discovered that my server was using IPv6 to send to GMail and messages were getting sent to Spam in Gmail because they were failing the SPF rule on my domain since I hadn’t included the IPv6 address in it! Fixed that and have had no problems.
@anna I’m not sending that many emails relatively speaking; probably between 3000 to 4000 per month. But I’ve only been using phplist for about a month. So far its mostly a big improvement over what I was using before (mostly because it got closed by the former operator). I’m still making adjustments and its improving all the time. =)
Oh, man, really, well you can just get the $1 a month package from phpList.com and not worry about anything any more! With 400 subscribers you really don’t need to be self-hosting at all, it’s totally an unnecessary amount of work buddy
