Hello everyone, it’s my first post here. I was recommend this community for it’s professionalism and “friendlyness”. During my stay here, please excuse my english. I know it can be unpleasant for you to read a thread with terrible grammar, I hate it in my native language, I’ll do my best.
Okay, so I’m having two major issues for my website to operate like I’d like it to, I’ve done everything I knew about, and I can’t think about anything else Google didn’t help me much either this time.
First one is that I seem to have a cookies/sessions problem. Well, I use Liberty Reserve to allow my members to top up their account. So I send my form to their SCI and when I either cancel or complete a transaction, I return to my website but I’m not logged in anymore! So the auto-add to balance system can’t work. Alright, when I saw this I was only using sessions, so I added cookies so I could rely on them too. And there again, same thing. Doubled, tripled checked all the LR settings and everything, I know they are right. But what’s really, really, weird to me and what’s really doing my head in is that I’m not actually logged out, because if I use another tab/window I’m still logged in. In other words, it’s only the window coming back from Liberty Reserve that won’t log in. The cookies are still here and so is the session so…
Another terrible thing is that it used to work when I was on my previous host (just moved to a dedicated server, which may be causing the problems, it’s the first time I administrate a dedi).
This is blocking my entire website from working.
And my second problem is with the function mail() -there again ‘caused’ by new server-. I don’t get any error message, or anything. The e-mails with cPanel/WHM work great. Though, I have done several tests and it never reaches my Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account. It did work with a Yopmail inbox though. So, I was focusing on ‘why isn’t it sending it’ but since I just noticed it worked with Yopmail, I’m sure it is sending it and have no ideas why wouldn’t it work with other e-mail service providers.
I hope you understood what I meant and that, hopefully, you guys can help me out with those totally handicapping issues.
Thank you,
Regards.
-Ben.
For your first problem, I suspect that the redirect is going to a different subdomain. For example, you start a session or drop a cookie at
http://www.example.com
, but then redirect to example.com (no www.). Or you are starting a session on a non-secure connection, then redirecting to a secure (https) one.
On the mail() issue, a lot of those mail servers you mentioned have extremely aggressive spam filters. You are likely sending some suspicious headers, or not sending enough headers. It might be good to find a good tried and true mail script that will set the appropriate headers. Also, if your subject or message is “spammy”, no amount of header manipulation will help
Thanks for your reply. About my first problem, I don’t know how to verify this, though it was working with exact identical settings on my previous server.
And for the mail() issue, I use my own function which was, there again, working great on other server. Nothing spammy or suspicious.
And again, the cookie is created under http://www.mydomain.com and the redirection is done to http://www.mydomain.com, nothing is changed from where the cookie is created to where the redirection is done.
Different server/php configurations will sometimes add their own headers to outgoing mail if they aren’t set - I would suggest comparing the headers on emails sent from both servers.
How can I “catch” the headers of the e-mail sent please?
The headers are part of the email - they are sent as text in the email but are hidden from display by mail clients. try googling “viewing email headers” or something of that nature to get instructions for whatever mail client you may be using.
Oh, that means I can’t catch them while sending? Because I never get the mail in my inbox so I don’t know how I’ll be able to see them.
Okay, so I got the headers that were sent in from both servers into a yopmail inbox. The mail function is EXACTLY the same. Though, one shows as spam, the other doesn’t.
Here’s the first one, that works great and doesn’t show as spam:
SMTP headers :
IP:xx.xx.xxx.x
EHLO hosting.anonhoster.com
MAIL FROM:<xxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx>
RCPT TO:<harrypotter@yopmail.com>
MIME headers :
Received: from apache by hosting.anonhoster.com with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <xxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx>)
id 1PximR-0000dg-Jx
for harrypotter@yopmail.com; Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:32:03 +0100
To: harrypotter@yopmail.com
Subject: Hello There
X-PHP-Script: xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx/mail.php for 178.73.198.9
From: admin@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx "\\r\
" .
Reply-To: admin@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx "\\r\
" .
"Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\\r\
".
X-Mailer: PHP/5.2.10
Message-Id: <E1PximR-0000dg-Jx@hosting.anonhoster.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:32:03 +0100
And this is the one that DOESN’T work with most e-mail providers but shows as spam in yopmail:
SMTP headers :
IP:XX.XX.XX.XXX
EHLO server.xxxxxxxxxxx.xx
MAIL FROM:<xxxx@server.xxxxxxxxxxx.xx>
RCPT TO:<harrypotter@yopmail.com>
MIME headers :
Received: from xxxx by server.xxxxxxxxxxx.xx with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <xxxx@server.xxxxxxxxxxx.xx>)
id 1PximL-0001w1-R1
for harrypotter@yopmail.com; Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:31:57 -0500
To: harrypotter@yopmail.com
Subject: Hello There
X-PHP-Script: xxxxxxxxxxx.xx/mail.php for 178.73.198.9
From: admin@xxxxxxxxxxx.xx "\\r\
" .
Reply-To: admin@xxxxxxxxxxx.xx "\\r\
" .
"Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\\r\
".
X-Mailer: PHP/5.2.17
Message-Id: <E1PximL-0001w1-R1@server.xxxxxxxxxxx.xx>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:31:57 -0500
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - server.xxxxxxxxxxx.xx
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - yopmail.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [503 500] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - server.xxxxxxxxxxx.xx
You can see that X-AntiAbuse are added when sent from the second server. Could that be the reason why?
Thank you.
To answer my question, no it doesn’t change anything even if I remove the X-AntiAbuse headers… So I don’t know what the problem could be.
the X-AntiAbuse headers are added by receiving mail server - there is nothing you can do about those.
Here’s my guess: the hosting provider you were using has an outgoing email monitoring system in place to track and eliminate spam, thus putting them on the “white list” for several mail server spam filters. Your new server is unknown to the same mail servers, so it goes through the regular spam filters, and there is probably something about either the messages you are sending or the headers that the spam filters don’t like. There is also a good chance of a server configuration that is causing the problem. For example, many spam filters try to connect to the server that sent the email to verify that it exists, etc. If the server isn’t accepting connections due to a firewall or something the spam filters are likely to reject the mail.
Hopefully you have a managed server and you can contact your support team regarding this issue - they are likely to be able to help.
one other quick thought - if you are including a url in the body of your email, a lot of spam filters will flat out reject these types of emails if the sender is not on their trusted list.
Thank you for replies.
Unfortunatly my server isn’t managed. This is what they replied when I asked for possible hints. I can’t afford the management of the server ($100/mo) if my website isn’t running. And it can’t run without e-mail support (fixed the Cookies problem by the way).
And no links were sent in any of the messages above. The message was “hello there”. And about X-AntiAbuse, they are actually added by Xime, I simply commented the line where it was adding them and they are not sent anymore.
Someone told me it could be because I had no reverse DNS redirected to my server’s main IP. I don’t really know what to do with this information, does that make any sense to you?