PHP email app gets blocked as 'spam' ?

[matt9b]

Hi all,

 

I have an internet shop. When someone buys something, after the payment is confirmed, the online shop sends out their personal download link in an email. It has all been working until recently, customers have been complaining that they haven't been receiving their download links.

 

I just received a letter from my ISP stating that emails have been blocked because there are too many being sent out that look similar. I explained that this is not spam, and that it is a genuine email containing customers' login details.

 

The ISP have said that there is very little that they can do; that even if they were able to mark my emails as 'not spam' in their system, there would be problems with it getting through some receipients ISPs as well (who have also got similar spam protection in place), and they don't control that.

 

Is there anything I can do to get my customers login details to them in an automated way, without having to type it by hand every time I get an order?

 

Thanks for the help, much appreciated.

[grissom]

One tip I learned - make sure the "return e-mail address" in the e-mail header is a genuine e-mail address. For some reason this helps it get through some spam filters.

[thehippy]

If their sole basis is that you have too much outgoing mail, that's BS.  What's more likely is that their spam filters are picking it up for other reasons.  Personally, I'd request the spam filter score from the particular email/spam filtering solution your ISP is using.

 

SpamAssassin is pretty much the de-facto standard in spam filtering, so if you can pass its filtering process you should be good.  There are a few spam assassin score checker's online, in which you email an address and it will evaluate the email and give you a summary.  This might be a bit precarious in your current situation though.

 

From Spam Assassin's wiki Some Tips for Legitimate Senders to Avoid False Positives

 

You might also want to check into DomainKeys for your email server.

 

You could also try GPG/PGP signing your emails (with PEAR's Crypt_RSA perhaps), though I'm not sure if this has any impact spam filter weighing.

[JamesThePanda]

Are you sending email from you server that hosts the site, or your computer?

 

Email Spam is a a big problem for ISP's

They usually have strict limits on how much can be sent out per hour. Also they will be constantly monitoring for Spam.

 

In order to send out email of that nature, I would recommend you use a 3rd party such as aweber get responce or constant contacts.

 

These specialist email companyies have agreements with most ISP that any email sent out from there servers is not spam. There for they can guarantee a higher delivery rate.

 

If you were to send out emails from your server that hosts you site, and you had 2000 signups on your email list from people whoose email ended with @aol.com

Aol have a cut off of 1000 email from a IP address per hour to there servers. anything after that is considered spam. so the other 1000 email will end up getting deleted.

 

Using a 3rd party they have an agreement with aol so there is no restrictions.

 

I would imagine that sending them out from your own computer then your ISP would get suspicious of email that look similar.

 

 

Thanks

 

James

[pastcow]

As well as DomainKeys you might also want to use the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) that is much easier to configure.

[doa24uk]

How many emails (roughly) are you sending per hour.

 

Also, an important question is where are you sending them from - home or your webserver? (As JamesThePanda asked).

 

If you're sending from php / your webserver then get in touch with your hosting company and tell them the mail server allocated to your account has been blacklisted. They will be able to lodge the proper paperwork / procedure to get it un-blacklisted.

 

Also, does it happen with ALL email accounts or only email to certain domains (ie. Hotmail)???