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• Adam Tyner •

Perhaps it's either an intermittent problem, or certain people's mail servers are rejecting those messages before they can be received.

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This is a problem I ran into that really had me stumped for awhile.

I was using mail() to send messages from a bulletin board I created via a form in order to keep users email addresses private (read no email mining possible). Problem was some people were not getting the messages. After testing on MANY different email accounts I was beginning to get stumped.

It seems that some ISP's and servers require that the Return-Path header email address match the From email address in order for it to be passed onto the users account. By adding

-f [email protected]

as the last parameter in the mail function to the same as the From address everything started getting recieved as it should. Here's two examples.

mail($to, $subject, $body, $from);

resulted in some people not receiving the message.

but...

mail($to, $subject, $body, $from, "-f $from_email_address");

everyone got the message as intended.

Hope this helps someone else out as it had me totally baffled until I started comparing the full headers of my email messages.

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