hotmail and newsletters

[simon147]

we have found that our last three newsletters have not been delivered to our @hotmail.com subscribers and they have not even arrived in the "junk" email inbox.

Does anybody have any suggestions why this may be?

Scott

[matbennett]

Scott,

You will probably find that yahoo users have not got their either. It is usually to do with the construction of your mail headers.

I'm having a bit of a hectic one today, but if you PM me I'd be happy to send you an example of how I get around this.

[matbennett]

Well I am currently begging for assistance on another forum, so now seems like a good time to answer this whilst I wait for help myself.

I'll post what I know here, as it may be useful to others (and someone else has already contact me about this!).

If I remember rightly, hotmail and Yahoo are both super anal about the way line breaks are used in headers. Get them wrong and they will assume that you are a spammer instantly, even with non-spammy content.

Here is the function that I am using. I think that this originally came from the php.net site . If you are not using PHP, then it should be easy enough to convert to whatever you are using

PHP Code:

function send_mail($myname, $myemail, $contactname, $contactemail, $subject, $message) {
  $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n";
  $headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\n";
  $headers .= "X-Priority: 1\n";
  $headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: High\n";
  $headers .= "X-Mailer: php\n";
  $headers .= "From: \"".$myname."\" <".$myemail.">\n";
  return(mail("\"".$contactname."\" <".$contactemail.">", $subject, $message, $headers)); 


I know that this one gets through both Yahoo & Hotmail. Good luck with it.

[drivetowin]

Mat

Thanks for that - certainly had a problem with our last newsletter not getting to hotmail users.

As a relative newbie to php, can you show a bit of code of how I could use this to send to a whole list of people (all the names are in a mysql database if that helps).

[matbennett]

This little example would send just to one person, assuming that the variables had been set

PHP Code:

send_mail("My Name", "me@myserver.com", $to_name, $to_email, $title, $message); 


I don't have a version to hand that does larger scale mailing, but if you compare the header section above with that of your existing script you will probably spot the problems.