Sending Mail with PHP & Escaping Hotmails Junk Folder

PHP E-mail goes to junk folder in hotmail

Daniel's link (sending mail with php & escaping hotmails junk folder) is going to be the most useful to you I think. We've been battling spam scores for years and had some decent success simply by following the rules, which you may find in the top answer for that link. In the end, we found it a lot easier to use a third party system like mail chimp to send mailers. Let them take the heat for your mail blasts.

Without providing a huge chunk of code that uselessly reinvents the wheel -

Make sure you have ALL proper headers in place.

Make sure you have an unsubscribe link

Try not to have an unreasonable image to text ratio. Like all image html emails will almost positively be spam to hotmail.

Research hotmail's spam guides and adhere to them

Everything else has been said over and over again.

Please keep in mind, I am not suggesting you use a third party system since that is not what you asked for in your question. I am simply telling you that the firm I work for has battled spam filters for years and though we have large success by following the rules, we have found it a lot easier to just let some other system handle the pain for us - and yes, you still need to follow the rules even if it is not your server. It is cheaper in the long run.

I would up daniel's answer if he turned his comment into a question.

How to send email in Hotmail's INBOX instead of JUNK using PHP?

Getting mail past the big mail provider's spam filters reliably requires more work and access than any single developer has.

You can start with things you can control, like RDNS records for your IP, SPF records for the mail server, setting up DomainKeys, etc. That'll help.

But you'll never negotiate the whitelist access legitimate e-mail companies have to get their mail to these clients and the daily work they do to stay on those whitelists and remove their IPs from blacklists.

The short answer: If you want programmatically sent mail to reach inboxes reliably, then use the services of someone in that business.

http://www.sendgrid.com

http://www.postmarkapp.com

http://aws.amazon.com/ses

cakephp email component emails go to hotmail junk folder

Cake simply uses the PHP built-in mail() facility. Without any further setup your mail is not going to be delivered by a proper MX server but rather the sendmail binary connects directly to the SMTP port on the remote host and attempts to deliver.

You see how easy it is to set up a spam sending facility like this. Mails delivered by a random machine instead of a proper mail server are very likely to be classified as spam.

Ask the web server admin to set up mail sending from the server. Alternatively you could use any trusted SMTP server to send mail (e.g. google).

PHP mail goes in spam and inbox

Use full headers to avoid spam

http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/avoid-spam-filters-with-php-mail-emails/

Prevent sent emails treated as junk mails using php mail function

php mail() - junk, sometimes not even received?

Using PHPMailer, or swiftmailer or any other library won't increase your delivery rates in most cases: the most likely culprit is your server set up.

Sending email successfully is notoriously difficult, have a read here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code.html for a basic overview of what's necessary.

Yahoo in particular really wants DKIM set up, and if your ISP hasn't done this for you, or you are on a VPS, can be a real pain.

Sucessfully sending email takes quite a bit more then simply not being on blacklists. The default of many ISPs it so assume you are SPAM until you have things set up that would make them think otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent.

In the codinghorror post, take note of this passage:

Port25 offers a really nifty public
service -- you can send email to
check-auth@verifier.port25.com and it
will reply to the from: address with
an extensive diagnostic!

I had to use an alternate address for the test to work; check-auth2@verifier.port25.com. You can read the details of why to test with each address here: http://www.port25.com/domainkeys/

In the long run, if you're sending transactional email (ie. not mass mailings but email in response to a user action) I recommend a service like postmark (postmarkapp.com) because at 1/10th of a cent per email, you get all the ugly taken care of for you.