Author Topic: Problems sending to hotmail accounts  (Read 5711 times)

Offline mrben

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Problems sending to hotmail accounts
« on: September 04, 2006, 10:49:26 AM »
Hi

I am having a problem sending to hotmail accounts that I cannot find documented on the forum.

Rather than my mails ending up in the Junk folder they just aren't getting through at all. I've double checked my config files and everything seems to be in order. I have no problems sending to other domains (although I haven't tried other free webmail providers yet (eg Yahoo, Gmail)).

My host also has 'horde' installed and when I send to hotmail accounts with this I experience no problems.

Has anyone any suggestions.

Regards,
Ben

Offline Delta-9

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Re: Problems sending to hotmail accounts
« Reply #1 on: September 04, 2006, 10:24:08 PM »
I assume you saw this: http://roundcubeforum.net/forum/index.php?topic=506.0 where others have had issues with Hotmail.  As I posted into that thread, I have no problems sending to hotmail.

Offline mrben

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Re: Problems sending to hotmail accounts
« Reply #2 on: September 05, 2006, 07:58:52 AM »
Thanks for the reply. Yes I have seen that thread. My problem just got weirder. If I reply to an email and include my hotmail address or forward an email to my hotmail address it works! But sending a new mail straight to the hotmail address doesn't appear in my inbox or junk mail folder.

Maybe this is related to the hotmail spam filter.

To reiterate: I can forward or reply to a hotmail address (even if the hotmail address wasn't the original sender) but not compose a new message. If I use horde (over roundcube) the mails to hotmail get through.

Anyone have any more suggestions?

Regards,
Ben

Offline Delta-9

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Re: Problems sending to hotmail accounts
« Reply #3 on: September 05, 2006, 08:44:19 AM »
Try creating a new message and cut-n-pasting a good bit of text from a newspaper article into the email. You might be sending a short email with "test, test" or something like that which then gets filtered. From the scenario you posted, you can forward or reply to a message fine, are you sure you are putting enough text into your email?

Offline fugaze

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Re: Problems sending to hotmail accounts
« Reply #4 on: October 02, 2006, 06:21:12 PM »
I'm having exactly the same problem.. I cannot send to hotmail accounts..

For anyone reading who might have an idea, please note I'm using JSAS and have this installed on my localhost.

Offline fugaze

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Re: Problems sending to hotmail accounts
« Reply #5 on: October 02, 2006, 07:44:02 PM »
It seems that having installed on my localhost was causing the problems... Everythings ok now!

Offline arkytek

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Re: Problems sending to hotmail accounts
« Reply #6 on: October 08, 2006, 07:50:20 AM »
Hey there

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but a solution I have used to combat the sending to hotmail problems is as follows:

After speaking to MSN/Hotmail themselves to ask what possible problems could be, we have gone through several problems...

1) SPF (make sure there is a SPF record in your DNS tables for the domain you are sending mail from)
2) Charset
3) Body text length

Originally they presumed it what going to be to do with 1) SPF after testing from some of my domains with and without SPF - I found this didn't make too much difference (although I recommend always having SPF records to help with global efforts of SPAM)

Secondly, we tested Charset - finding out that RoundCube defaults to UTF-8 was quite a problem, not necessarily ours (users and makers of RoundCube) but with Hotmail, it seems messages sent to them using UTF-8 could be blocked...I tested using ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) and things got better...

I therefore updated the file /program/include/main.inc - the following section:

 // language has special charset configured
  if (isset($rcube_charsets[$lang]))
    $charset = $rcube_charsets[$lang];
  else
    $charset = 'UTF-8'; 
  ----> I changed this to ISO-8859-1 from UTF-8

So its now $charset = 'ISO-8859-1';

I understand that some language settings will change this default charset setting but having it default to ISO seemed to work for using UK/GB/US English. This seemed to correct most of the problems.

The only other things we tried with Hotmail were Subject, and Body length - if an email is too short or doesn't have a subject it also seems to cause issues with Hotmail.

I'm not sure if this is a total confirmed fix to this problem, but its working for me and my webmail users.

Thanks
Dominic