Fixing AOL email issues
Posted: February 23rd, 2007 | Author: Foamcow | Filed under: Vintage | | Comments Off
I’ve been working on a site that uses a mailform. The client wanted the mail from the form to go to an AOL account. No probs? Wrong!
AOL have some tough anti spam measures in place that will drop mail into a spam folder or, in the case of my form, blackhole it. The messages weren’t arriving anywhere and tests showed that no error message was sent back from AOL.
After some experimentation and a read through the delightful AOL Postmaster Help site I hit upon the solution.
It seems that if the Return-Path header does not match the From header then AOL ditch the mail. This might seem fair enough on the face of it, but when mail is coming from a form the return path is often the postmaster address on the hosts domain. Since, for the sake of usability, the From header is set to the address of the person filling in the form (so it can be replied to easily and the name shows up in the recipient mail client) the headers do not match.
The solution – modify the Return-path header!
Do this by adding
-f myname@mydomain.com
to your mail headers and voila!
Of course AOL introduced these measures to prevent people spoofing headers to bypass spam filters but we are having to do just that to get genuine mail through to them. Oh the irony!
