Important AOL Email Issue [SOLVED]

Discussion in 'Payments processing' started by ezminisites, Mar 27, 2007.

  1. ezminisites

    ezminisites New Member

    Joined:
    Jul 3, 2006
    Messages:
    40
    I am marking my own thread SOLVED because I figure dit out and am posting it back here for others.

    I was having a problem with some of my subscribers not getting their 'confirmation' emails which had their login details etc. Resulted in some pretty irate people I can tell you.

    I looked into it and found that 99% of them were from AOL. The others I put down to glitches or heavy traffic.

    I then tried to use the 'Resend Signup Email' feature, but again to the AOL users, nothing got through.

    I began to think I was being blacklisted, so I started digging around. Nothing, not even my ISP had an answer. A Support ticket turned up nothing either, just got told there was no function to not send email to AOL (which there is actually if you add AOL to your Block List in Admin Panel, although I am not sure if this only prevents them from signing up with AOL address in the first place)

    I then tried sending email to AOL address from my regular domain, and it went through ok. SO my domain is not being blocked by AOL, and neither is my IP.

    The only thing in the way was Amember.

    I tore my hair out for about 3 hours, sending test emails to myself. I looked up the AOL site and went through all their blacklisting self-help area:

    http://postmaster.info.aol.com/

    I found out they look for an IP address in the Received Path to identify your server for sending mail. So I checked the headers the Amember script was forming when it sent email, and there was no IP in the 'Received Path'. Check AOL for info here:

    http://postmaster.info.aol.com/tools/ipverify.html

    Using Amember to send email to the address they provided gave me nothing at all back, so I sent an email to my own domain as per the Manual Instructions.

    I noticed there was no IP at all in the Received line.

    This means AOL basically CAN'T resolve it so it doesn't. No bounce, no error, nothing. My email simply wasn't processed and was most likely simply deleted.

    SO I thought about how to add the IP to my outgoing mail info (short of hacking the hell out of it), and I tested the various 'Email Send Method' settings in Amember.

    Login: Setup/Configuration>Email>Email System Configuration

    Three options, all worked to send email to my domain so my emailing was fine, but only one sends an IP stamp:

    Set to SMTP host and set variable to 'localhost'

    I tested this and sent a test email to my domain and to my test AOL address and it worked! Now my subscriber will get email to their AOL address.

    What this does it set the IP to be a local IP stamp: 127.0.0.1 most probably, but it depends on your machine.

    [Using PHP sending or Sendmail sending was not adding any IP to the Received line so they were failing AOL]

    You could also test using your domain instead of 'localhost' but I have not done this, I am happy it works now.

    So if you are using Amember to run subscriptions and accepting AOL users, set your Email to use SMTP and set it to 'localhost' and you should be fine.

    It works for me!

    DJ

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