NYCPHP Meetup

[Rolan Yang]

This is probably not a PHP issue.
It sounds like there might be an problem with the mail server on your 
web hosting environment. Either a configuration issue or the server ip 
could be on a blacklist. I run a few mail servers that permit users to 
configure auto forwarding of  email to other addresses. Unfortunately, 
these customers receive a lot of spam which is also forwarded to their 
accounts at Yahoo. Yahoo has lately become more aggressive with their 
spam blocking by employing techniques like throttling or even temporary 
rejection of all email from an ip when too much spam has been received 
from one source. Because of this, email going to Yahoo has occasionally 
been delivered slower than the normal 1-2 second delay. On a shared 
hosting environment, there could be hundreds of websites sending 
spam-like mail to hosts like yahoo. The more sites there are hosted on 
one ip, the more likely they are to be throttled or blocked. If this is 
the case, you might have to resort to hosting on a dedicated server to 
obtain any reliability in sending mail.

~Rolan



Marc Antony Vose wrote:
> Hi there:
>
> I'm a little stumped about quite how to proceed with sorting out a problem.
>
> I just set up a web server at servermatrix for a client, and a rather 
> complicated site.  We're on a redhat linux box with cpanel.
>
> One of the features of the site is a postcard->email thing, and they 
> were complaining about not being able to receive email via this 
> feature.  However, every time I tested it, I was receiving it.
>
> So, I put a small script on the server that just sends dummy text via 
> mail().  Again, I received the emails.
>
> I had them give me an email address on their company domain, and - 
> voila - i didn't receive any emails I attempt to send to that account 
> from the server.  It appears not to have anything to do with 
> client-side spam filters, though of course I can't know what spam 
> filters are installed at the various domains.
>
> Apparently, mac.com and hotmail.com are other known problem domains.
>
> The question is:  what circumstances could make this new server only 
> be able to email certain domains, and how can I go about finding it 
> out?  How can I find out what problems the server may be having?
>
> This is all new for me; never seen anything quite like this before. 
> If anyone has any "If I were you, I would ______" advice, it'd be 
> greatly appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
>
>