PHP mail to external domains - UK Web Hosting | Dedicated Server Windows and Linux VPS Forum

**Macca** · #1 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 08:18

I have many scripts across my domains that successfully send email via PHP. Usually these emails are delivered to an email address within a domain hosted on an EUK server.

However one customer of mine has emails sent to his BTinternet email address and this sometimes takes up to 10 hours to deliver.

I also have sent test messages to an email account I have through 1&1 and these don't even get delivered.

I have checked and these addresses do not have any filters running on them and the messages aren't being placed in a junk folder.

Does anyone know a way of ensuring PHP mail gets delivered to all email accounts?

Thanks.

**WelshTom** · #2 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 09:35

Ensure your domain name has an SPF record, and that all the server IP addresses have rDNS enabled.

I would also suggest you take a look at your server mail queue, as the messages could probably be stuck there, and not always on the server in which your trying to send email to.

**Macca** · #3 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 09:41

Thomas, thanks.

I have a reseller package and am on 78.129.133.140.

Can I do this all from my end?

**WelshTom** · #4 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 11:26

SPF records can be added by your end - but if you're not too sure how to do it; it's best to let someone more experienced to do it, as DNS is a very simple thing to corrupt.

Would you like me to do this for you?

**Macca** · #5 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 11:32

Yes that would be great, thank you.

The domain that is causing the problems at the moment is giftideasforu.co.uk

Thanks

**247h** · #6 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 12:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by eUK-Thomas

...I would also suggest you take a look at your server mail queue, as the messages could probably be stuck there, and not always on the server in which your trying to send email to.

Judging by my own recent experiences with Yahoo mailservers (and yes that seemingly includes traffic to BTInternet) there's a strong possibility that many of those delays are due to the messages being grey-listed and therefore stuck in your server's mail queue for hours (occasionally days) at a time. As a reseller you have no means to monitor the queue and/or try to force delivery manually ...

I have an open ticket with Yahoo about this and they're being particularly slow in responding!

**WelshTom** · #7 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 12:17

The SPF record has been added. The rDNS entry is currently pending completion.

**Macca** · #8 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 13:29

Thanks Thomas, that's great.

247h, you're probably right.

**esnail** · #9 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 14:36

I'm having issues with yahoo mail too, I send out newsletters to a myriad of email addresses, gmail gets delivered no problem, as does my own domains' mail - but yahoo cannot be delivered...

the error reads:

HTML Code:

MailEnable: Message delivery has been delayed.

Message is waiting at eurofighter.eukhost.com for delivery to mx2.mail.ukl.yahoo.com.

The message will be retried for another 29 hours.

Reason: Mail Server for yahoo.co.uk could not accept your email at this time. MailEnable will keep trying to deliver this message and will notify you of any progress.

Is this a yahoo problem? or a server problem this end?

**247h** · #10 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 15:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by esnail

... Is this a yahoo problem? or a server problem this end?

That's a good question and one that I'm trying to pinpoint (hence the ticket placed with Yahoo) but, as you have found with other mails within the same grouping being delivered straight away, it all points to Yahoo's grey-listing policy.

It must be putting huge overload on their servers that they are deferring mails by the million, for multiple retries at the delivery end — it's complete nonsense!

What I am seeing in this trend is that the worst affected mails are either those being generated in mailing lists or server apps, and/or mails being forwarded (by account-based rules) to Yahoo, e.g. some of my clients receive mail from externally to the server, or receive internally from their domain, then they have a forwarding rule to their Yahoo account — always held in the mail queue. In such forwarding examples, if they also forward to Gmail or Hotmail etc., no problem ...

Anyone else with a dedicated server care to comment or contradict, then please step forward?

**eUKhost.com** · #11 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 22:14

Last month we had similar problem with Yahoo. We tried everything possible but things didn't work.

Our guys had setup multiple yahoo accounts and we got our emails whitelisted from all those accounts one by one. Marked emails in junk folder as "not spam" and suddenly things got sorted.

I know this makes no sense but we did try all techie things before choosing this route.

**eUKhost.com** · #12 (**permalink**) 20-09-2007, 22:57

Roger,

I'll personally take care of your problem tomorrow or day after tomorrow. I believe that I might know fix for your problem so let me give a try. Saturday should be most convenient for me so message me as per priority of this problem.

Others are most welcome to message me on MSN.

**247h** · #13 (**permalink**) 21-09-2007, 01:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by eUKhost.com

Our guys had setup multiple yahoo accounts and we got our emails whitelisted from all those accounts one by one. Marked emails in junk folder as "not spam" and suddenly things got sorted.

Mark, I wrote this before your last message then got distracted and forgot to post it:

I appreciate the feedback — I didn't ever seriously think it was a technical issue on this side but the deferral notices Yahoo use really don't help anyone get to the bottom of this. Their advice pages and email communications are so generic that they're virtually a waste of time (as I'm sure you discovered).

What you're suggesting then about those Yahoo addressees affected, is that they ensure they check their Junk Mail folders and mark all wanted messages as non-Junk in order to prevent further grey-listing of the forwarders' mail server(s)? Is that correct?

Unfortunately that's going to be really difficult for any reseller that has clients who run mailing lists, or clients that forward to unassociated recipients, to inform those recipients with Yahoo addresses that there is a problem.

Now that I've read your most recent response, if the above is correct I find it hard to believe that any changes to my server will override Yahoo's policies, but I'll try and contact you on Saturday as suggested — thanks for that!

**WelshTom** · #14 (**permalink**) 21-09-2007, 07:00

rDNS has been enabled on the IP addresses you specified.

**esnail** · #15 (**permalink**) 21-09-2007, 09:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by 247h

Mark, I wrote this before your last message then got distracted and forgot to post it:

I appreciate the feedback â€” I didn't ever seriously think it was a technical issue on this side but the deferral notices Yahoo use really don't help anyone get to the bottom of this. Their advice pages and email communications are so generic that they're virtually a waste of time (as I'm sure you discovered).

What you're suggesting then about those Yahoo addressees affected, is that they ensure they check their Junk Mail folders and mark all wanted messages as non-Junk in order to prevent further grey-listing of the forwarders' mail server(s)? Is that correct?

Unfortunately that's going to be really difficult for any reseller that has clients who run mailing lists, or clients that forward to unassociated recipients, to inform those recipients with Yahoo addresses that there is a problem.

Now that I've read your most recent response, if the above is correct I find it hard to believe that any changes to my server will override Yahoo's policies, but I'll try and contact you on Saturday as suggested â€” thanks for that!

I won't be able to contact until Monday - so I'll be interested to hear how you get on with this issue. The problem I was finding with yahoo was that the message being sent wasn't arriving at the yahoo junk folder anyway.

**247h** · #16 (**permalink**) 21-09-2007, 12:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by esnail

...The problem I was finding with yahoo was that the message being sent wasn't arriving at the yahoo junk folder anyway.

I don't know if that's also true of my situation — all the messages I'm describing are held in the mail queue of my server and, after they are finally delivered (often forcefully), I'm not party to any information from the Yahoo account holders whether the messages arrived as Junk Mail and whether they have subsequently whitelisted those sender addresses or not ...

If you know your messages are never being delivered then it suggests they are staying in the mail queue until expiry, or they are being dumped by the server's own message filters (yes it happens), or worse still, your server has been blacklisted by Yahoo. Until you ask your server Admin if those are being held in the queue, or what the queue deferral messages contain, how can you know?

I have the impression that the eUKhost experiments were probably not done with mailing list or forwarded examples like my own, but regularly addressed mail which I don't seem to have a problem delivering to Yahoo addresses — either that or none of my clients are sending messages to Yahoo accounts other than in the ways I described! All I can confirm is that an eUKhost support person has logged into my server as root and successfully sent an email to their Yahoo test account, which is partly why I arrived at the conclusion that it's only affecting Mailman, apps and forwardees.

This prompts me to ask Mark, who in your organisation checks the mail queue on each Shared Hosting server and manages it like I do with mine?

**eUKhost.com** · #17 (**permalink**) 21-09-2007, 15:06

Only thing that I can do from our servers is to compare settings of those which have no problem with sending emails to Yahoo and implement those settings on your servers.

Nothing much can be done if emails are completely rejected by Yahoo. We need to find a solution to allow your emails to reach yahoo. Expecting any solution from Yahoo is not worth.

One thing I know about Yahoo is their per minute connection policy. If your mailing list exceeds that limit then you are blocked for a certain amount of time.

**esnail** · #18 (**permalink**) 21-09-2007, 17:25

Its a curious problem. Visitors to my website can sign up for the newsletter - and they receive their confirmation email - even yahoo! But when I send the email, the yahoo addresses aren't delivered - all other addresses receive there newsletters fine.
(I am using swift mailer to send the newsletters on smtp setting if that helps at all?)

**eUKhost.com** · #19 (**permalink**) 21-09-2007, 20:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by esnail

Its a curious problem. Visitors to my website can sign up for the newsletter - and they receive their confirmation email - even yahoo! But when I send the email, the yahoo addresses aren't delivered - all other addresses receive there newsletters fine.
(I am using swift mailer to send the newsletters on smtp setting if that helps at all?)

Our billing system as well as Helpdesk was failing to send emails to Yahoo users but somehow our problem got sorted with the method I mentioned in previous post. I might be able to solve your problem only with my belief and not due to any sort of internal communication with Yahoo

I know what sort of mess they have in their system so lets hope we get some positive comments from you in this thread once your problem gets fixed

**247h** · #20 (**permalink**) 22-09-2007, 09:22

Mark, from research I've done this morning in other forums it seems there is a general agreement that DomainKeys needs to be set up in each account's DNS Zone entry on my server.

I began by finding this posting "Getting your IP whitelisted with Yahoo (solving the deferred 451 problem)" in the SmarterTools forum — I attempted to post it here but failed as it's over 10,000 characters!

Did your team install DomainKeys in any of their experimentations?