Improper Return Path Email Headers Being Sent

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 6

Howdy,

Recently we noticed a bunch of bounced newsletters and started looking for the reason as to why. Apparently html_newsletter is sending out the emails with improper headers as follows:

Return-path: <nobody@server3.oursite.com>Envelope-to: jigger5@hotmail.com
Delivery-date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:02:33 -0500
Received: from nobody by server3.oursite.com with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <nobody@server3.oursite.com>)
id 1NQU2L-0003YO-RH

The concern is the red above. I have removed our url and replaced it with "oursite" for the purposes of demonstration.

To avoid spam filters return path and received from should contain a valid email address such as:

Return-path: <support@oursite.com>
Envelope-to: jigger5@hotmail.com
Delivery-date: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:35:29 -0500
Received: from nobody by server3.oursite.com with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <support@oursite.com>)
id 1NQum1-0001hU-BC
for abuse@oursite.com; Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:35:29 -0500

Now I have been able to correct this issue in for the registration and password sending feature for our site using:

mail($user_email, $subject, $message, "From: $from", "-f $from");

and

mail($user_email, $subject, $message, "From: $adminmail\nX-Mailer: PHP/", "-f $adminmail");

In the Your_Account module but I can't find anywhere to do this in the html_newsletter module. Any help would be appreciated (and it will solve deliverability issues for all others as well).

Thank you!

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1360

I realize that the HTML Newsletter is in need of upgrading... been way too long since 1.3 was released. You will find the mail send headers built here:

modules\HTML_Newsletter\admin\functions.php

Feel free to change these as desired. It is down in:

function msnl_fSendNls

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1360

BTW, was also planning on integrating with TegoNuke(tm) Mailer which uses the Swift Mailer underneath. It does a much better job of handling the headers amongst other things.

Newbie Joined: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 6

Yea I finally found them but because of the way you build the header string I'm unsure of how to do it. Using the examples above do you know of a way to do it? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1360

Did you see the code here?

Code:

$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\n"
   . 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n"
   . 'From: ' . $sSender . '<' . $adminmail . '>' . "\r\n"
   . 'Return-Path: ' . $adminmail . "\r\n"
   . 'Reply-To: ' . $adminmail . "\r\n"
   . 'X-Mailer: MSHNL' . "\r\n"
   . 'X-Sender-IP: ' . $REMOTE_ADDR . "\r\n"
   . 'X-Priority: 3' . "\r\n";

You can change the headers to whatever you wish and then the following will use them:

Code:

mail($user_email[0], $sEmailTitle, $emailfile, $headers)

If you are using the TegoNuke(tm) Mailer (wasn't sure if you are using PHP-Nuke or RavenNuke(tm)), this $headers will not work. But, it would be quite a bit more involved to change the Mailer so I don't want to go through the effort of figuring that out if you are not using it...

Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 387

Mail headers are outside the scope of my knowledge but the last time I had issues with return paths being nobody@ it was actually a PHP configuration problem.
nobody@ is the server root mail address.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 1360

Yeah, I'd really like to know if it works by changing the headers.

I agree Guardian, the issue is the PHP configuration, but when you are on a shared host, can the host make that specific to each account or is just one possible? My guess is that its just one.

ispgeek, you may get better results using SMTP and TegoNuke(tm) Mailer. Worth a try as the underlying Swift Mailer library is quite robust.