the initial automatically generated e-mails from this forum had 'Nobody" in the sender field.
now it has been reconfigured to read 'info [at] expatinturkey.com' .
it looks awful since it just contains the same info as in the email field.
i think something like 'Expat of Turkey" would be much more appropriate.

also, i received three emails so far, the first two with the nobody, and one with info [at] expatinturkey.com, all three landed in the spam folder. i ran a quick search to see if the ip address from the sender is in a spam database...came back negative.

it would be interesting to see if it is only yahoo that sorts these mails out as spam, or if the same problem occurs with aol, hotmail, gmail, etc.
i almost deleted the email thinking it was spam. would be a real annoyance if people kept deleting their sign on emails, newsletters, etc.

also the 'account activated' email didn't have a link referring to the website...i think it is wise to have a link in any email message that is sent from the forum.

hope the feedback helps

thank you for the feedback justforfun. before i even begin commenting on the feedback you have provided us with, i think we should ask ourselves a very important question to start with: 'do we need users to activate their accounts via an email?'

the reason it has happened up till now, is because this is the standard setting after one installs the phpBB software on the server. but of course the email activation option can be disabled depending on whether we want to involve ourselves with harvesting the email addresses of our users, or not. i'd like to hear your opinions and those of others, in answer to the above question.

FD

any form of email activation usually has one purpose only: to verify the email account. since this is not reallya service depending on the validity of the email accounts, i don't think there is a need for email verification

however, any of the comments i had previously still apply.
there will be email notifications for pm's and posts...there will be email announcements for meet ups for example, there will be newsletteres, etc
all of these are important enough to be communicated in a way that they don't get deleted by accident only because they are in the spam bin.

i personally think the spam bin issue is a real big one. it could be due to the fact that the email server in question has been used for spamming previously and ended up on in a spam database.

the sender line and link in every email that gets sent out are just minor details and can be reconfiged quite quickly i'd assume.

anyone else feel the same about verification or are there different views out there? i am with justforfun on this one!
point taken as far as further email notifications are concerned!
as for the spam bin issue i beg to differ. as we are still trying to find our feet with the new forum software [phpBB] i'll try to find a plausible explanation but i may be wrong [i learn something new every day], so bear with me please!
i believe Yahoo is a case of so called False-Positives! for spam filters to recognise emails without a sender as spam I think is quite sensible however i believe the third email you received with info at expatinturkey dot com should not have landed in the spam bin. i registered my flying Dutchman account by making use of Bigfoot email service. This company is one of the leaders in fighting spam. the activation email [without sender] was not labeled as spam by Bigfoot and neither by the spam filter of my email client. I since then changed my email address in my profile to go directly to a POP3 account thus can't comment from there onwards [but am still receiving emails from the forum]. However I am positive if I was to change it back to Bigfoot I would happily receive all notification emails, newsletters, etc. Steve signed up two users with a hotmail account, we should ask him to comment on whether he had any problems re: spam bin issue. just a thought justforfun have you checked your filters at Yahoo for perhaps filtering anything that contains 'info' in the sender address??probably, yes! but not from the admin panel of phpBB. it may need some coding effort which shouldn't be too hard either but it is just a matter of finding which file and where to edit the code!

FD
PS you are right justforfun; the server is not listed in the SBL neither in the XBL

i just tested aol and the first sign up email came through

so far all emails that i'm receiving on my yahoo account have gone to the spam folder,even the recent ones notifying me of the posts from you fd.

i have not configured anything specific regarding spam on my yahoo account, so what ever algorithms and identifiers and databases it uses to identify spam is the standard set-up by yahoo. i'm sure that other yahoo users will have the same problem as long as they have not customized anything.

i have checked and i'm receiving other emails with 'info' in the sender line without problems.

i have no experience with bigfoot, but i know that hotmail and aol are known for having constant false-positives, yahoo is usually much more liberal in letting emails through.

one thing is for sure, the spam issue is not because the ip is in a spam database (at least not the major ones), and not because of a algorithm that concludes from the subject line since i had several different subject lines so far. the contents varied as well, with links and without links in them...so an algorithm based on that can't be the issue either.

i received a Topic Reply Notification and had also been notified that "anton" JohnF's aol user had signed up!

I will sign up my girlfriend with her Yahoo -account and see what results I get. There is no point in trying to prove something if we cannot at least replicate the issue under similar circumstances i.e. another Yahoo user.

Let you know how I get on.
FD

same result! straight in the bin
i am dumbfounded by this as I can't see why that should happen, because it shouldn't. bloody Yahoo! as you wrote justforfun... it is not in the subject line, neither in the content of the message and also not in the senders name since you received other emails with 'info' in the sender line without problems.

perhaps it has something to do with 'Open relays' but then again Bigfoot service should have picked up on that one for sure... it is even an option in the user settings and I've got that one switched on. there is just one other thing I could try. let me explain!

the forum uses a script to send its notification, activation, newsletters emails. this, I think is the preferred option. it can be changed and set as to let our SMTP server take care of the forum emails but it will mean bigger loads for this server + the domain host provider will hold copies of all messages passing through this server. generally speaking there could be a delay in the delivery of messages as well when using SMTP server. the script is way faster!

so let me know guys ... should we run with the SMTP server or with the script?

FD

PS justforfun could you send me one of the 'info' emails [including full headers] you received at your Yahoo account? i would like to put them next to those that i have got. tnx.

justforfun just confirmed to me that using the SMTP server still had email from this forum ending up in Yahoo's Bulkmail folder!

so, that option is out of the window then as well, any ideas anyone? cos i ran out of them!

FD

i tried a few reverse dns lookup tools on the web, however, many of them were not able to resolve the email ip to a dns...that could be one reason since spam filters usually block ip addresses that don't resolve back to a dns

I signed up 3 times.
starman went to spymac email. no problem
test went to hotmail. no problem
administrator went to hotmail and again no problem.
seems to be a yahoo issue then.

DNS zone for the domain expatinturkey.com holds the following records
NOTE: expatinturkey.com is a master DNS server.

using an emailTracker on info@ expatinturkey.com gives following results:
Server mail.expatinturkey.com Prio 10 IP Address 67.15.104.26 Status Connected

a [Backtrace] route report can be found here

name servers at Everyones Internet, Inc are
ns1.ev1.net 216.88.76.6
ns2.ev1.net 216.88.77.7

email address resolved all the way back to Houston, TX, USA. for me everything checks out fine!! will post email headers in another post for review. but after that, it is to the customer service of Yahoo!

FD

The following email headers were those of a Topic Reply Notification - Automatic e-mail from the forum

The X-Headers are added by Yahoo's mail server and cause the email to end up in the Bulkfolder. As you can see in the next post where I will include headers from a Topic Reply Notification as received by me, the 'To:' header is empty in the Yahoo email but at mine there is a undisclosed recipients value. This is needed because more than one person is watching this topic and we don't want to reveal the other email addresses. I believe this may have a negative effect for Yahoo... dishing the email in the bin!

if that's the problem, then i think it isn't such a big issue...it would only be a matter of finding out how to change the mail script to change the header data it maintains in the outgoing mails...since other anonymous distribution mails that i receive have the x type header fields, but not the empty 'to' field as seen above...so specifically the cause for the empty 'to' field might be the problem and there seems to be a way to avoid that with anonymous mails