NYCPHP Meetup

[Ken Robinson]

At 08:24 AM 3/9/2006, Marc Antony Vose wrote (in part):

>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.

Since you mention cPanel, I'm assuming you're on a shared host. If 
you look at the full headers of an email you received, you will see a 
header that looks something like

      Return-path: <nobody at the_domain_of_the_shared_host.com>

This header should be of the form

      Return-path: <someuser at your_domain.com>

In order to get this to happen, you need to use the fifth parameter 
to the mail() function.

     $param5 = '-f someuser at your_domain.com';
    mail($to, $subj, $message, $headers, $param5);

Ken