Mail sent by mail() marked as spam... free email sending?

[moose-en-a-gant]

I don't understand

 

I used to be hosted by GoDaddy and had email working with mail() but then I switched to OVH and had to install mail() function

 

Now my emails sent are marked as spam

 

Do I have to pay for email sending?

 

Otherwise I'll avoid email sending and find an alternate method

 

[CroNiX]

Email is an art, with a heck of a lot of complications if you want to get delivered straight to the inbox. Many things can affect it such as the headers you send, whether or not the "from" is an email account on your actual domain (user@xyz.com shouldn't be sending as user@abc.com), domain reputation, spam filters on the domain the mail is being sent TO, whether or not your domain has a PTR record, whether you have a SPF record, whether you have DKIM setup, whether or not your IP/Domain is listed in a RBL, whether or not your email server is acting as an open-relay, and a myriad of other things.  Most people aren't experts and this goes WAY beyond using code to send email. If you have mission critical email, I'd really use a 3rd party solution such as sendgrid.

 

One place to start would be something like mxtoolbox. Enter your mail servers domain (like mail.yourhost.com) and see what it says.

[moose-en-a-gant]

I tested my domain, I was able to send mail yet the SMTP doesn't seem to exist, does that make sense?

 

"Unable to connect after 15 seconds" was my result

 

I haven't set up SMTP yet, I'll have to compare my DNS from one domain to another to see any differences.

Thank you for your thorough response.