New users complaining that not receiving email registration verification emails

[Maltair]

After setting to the mail.myforum.com SMTP, For whatever reason some emails are returned undeliverable, all registration emails to hotmail/outlook, and some private email confirmation emails sent to hotmail/outlook and yahoo, but at least post-SMTP setting I get a notification of undeliverable while before I did not get any notification.

[Necrophyte]

I had this with providers like godaddy and hostgator. Hotmail was always the biggest one. gmail worked no problem, hotmail would get blocked. You just have to contact your provider and let them know your having issues. Start a ticket with them. I had this issue with hostgator. It took about a week before the emails started going through ok. It only takes a couple of your users saying this is spam for Hotmail to block your emails.

[Maltair]

Hostgator doesn't have a ticket system anymore - just phone in or chat. This is cool for instant (instant after waiting twenty minutes for an available agent) support on a single issue that does not require follow up, but for something like this, I tried the chat and the agent just said more or less that "everything is working fine this is the way it is." I'll try again, it's often the luck of the draw of which agent answers the phone or the online chat.

[Wayne Luke]

In your CPANEL, there should be an option to view your Email address. If not immediately visible, click on "More" then Configure Email Client. You'll see your SMTP information under Outgoing. Use that in the vBulletin settings. It is recommended to use the SSL/TLS settings. The screen area that you're looking for should look like:

[Maltair]

Well, if I use the Secure SSL/TLS Settings, then I'm using gatorXXXX.hostgator.com for the outgoing server, as opposed to mail.myforum.com I thought the point of all this was to try to make it appear that my email was coming from my actual forum domain, versus from just hostgator.

But anyway, if I understood the hostgator rep correctly, she said that on a shared server the email will appear to come from hostgator rather than from my domain, no matter how set, which could be why this is happening. I called hostgator again but the only suggestion they had was to create a specific email account for [email protected] which I did, but the issue currently remains (with SMTP set for non-SSL settings using mail.myforum.com as the outgoing.

[Mark.B]

The domain used by the smtp server does not dictate the domain used by the outgoing mail. If it does, then that's a peculiar set up at hostgator.

Yes the headers will ultimately show the originating server as hostgator, since that's how email transport works, but the from address should be your own forum.

It's not really possible for anything in vBulletin to override stuff the hosts have configured, if they have done something to change the native behaviour of an email server.

[Maltair]

Apparently, at a shared server at hostgator, mail.myforum.com is likely simply an alias to a hostgator email server and not a true server only for myforum.com which is why it is not trusted as much.

Exchange with hostgator via chat on this subject:

what vbulletin said is: "It is a well know issue that it is almost impossible to send emails to Microsoft owned email addresses (hotmail/outlook/live...) using a shared host or shared email server. They only accept emails from email servers that perfectly match the domain sending them. There is nothing in the vBulletin software that can change this, you would need to have the email server setup to their liking. "
3:40:00 ME: However, I assumed that changing so that the emails come from mail.myforum.com would solve the issue but apparently not?
3:40:39 HOSTGATOR: Not in this case, that would basically mean that messages sent from a VPS or dedicated mail server would be accepted unlike those sent from Shared servers.

[Maltair]

I converted to using sendgrid for smtp (free 12K emails per month account), and the tests I did show that emails including registration ones came through fine to a hotmail account, and also that emails that came through to gmail came through fine not erroneously marked as coming from "PayPal."

Few additional settings needed just for those of you considering using sendgrid:

At Sendgrid:
I went ahead and whitelisted the domain. I used the subdomain name default.myforum.com
After whitelisting it you must go in to your server cpanel and add these CNAME records, and then validate this domain back at sendgrid.
If you do not whitelist your domain in this way, all emails sent out by your forum will appear to come from sendgrid instead of from [email protected]

I also whitelisted all the email links using the subdomain links.myforum.com This is a similar process to the above and avoids sendgrid sticking its name into the URL links in your emails.

I could not whitelist any IP address because on a free Sendgrid account you don't get this option. But this doesn't seem to be a problem and emails are getting through.

HOWEVER, I didn't really like the long long URLs that sendgrid creates even with the whitelisting, so I went into Tracking and inactivated Click Tracking so that the URLs originating from the forum remained intact.

Another setting I had to make Active was in sendgrid Mail Settings - "Plain Content" (Convert your plain text emails to HTML) - without this setting made green/active, the test emails sent by the forum at Maintenance/Disagnostics/Email were arriving improperly formatted.

So far, so good. As far as the 12K limit, that's more than enough for new user registrations, even figuring an average of three emails per registrant (Activation, welcome, and new private message), but then also the system will send out an email for each private message too and for some users for posts made in threads they follow, etc. We'll see if 12K will suffice.

But anyway so far this sendgrid appears to be getting the job done versus the hostgator smtp which was not.

[Raptor]

I converted to using sendgrid for smtp (free 12K emails per month account), and the tests I did show that emails including registration ones came through fine to a hotmail account, and also that emails that came through to gmail came through fine not erroneously marked as coming from "PayPal."

Few additional settings needed just for those of you considering using sendgrid:

At Sendgrid:
I went ahead and whitelisted the domain. I used the subdomain name default.myforum.com
After whitelisting it you must go in to your server cpanel and add these CNAME records, and then validate this domain back at sendgrid.
If you do not whitelist your domain in this way, all emails sent out by your forum will appear to come from sendgrid instead of from [email protected]

I also whitelisted all the email links using the subdomain links.myforum.com This is a similar process to the above and avoids sendgrid sticking its name into the URL links in your emails.

I could not whitelist any IP address because on a free Sendgrid account you don't get this option. But this doesn't seem to be a problem and emails are getting through.

HOWEVER, I didn't really like the long long URLs that sendgrid creates even with the whitelisting, so I went into Tracking and inactivated Click Tracking so that the URLs originating from the forum remained intact.

Another setting I had to make Active was in sendgrid Mail Settings - "Plain Content" (Convert your plain text emails to HTML) - without this setting made green/active, the test emails sent by the forum at Maintenance/Disagnostics/Email were arriving improperly formatted.

So far, so good. As far as the 12K limit, that's more than enough for new user registrations, even figuring an average of three emails per registrant (Activation, welcome, and new private message), but then also the system will send out an email for each private message too and for some users for posts made in threads they follow, etc. We'll see if 12K will suffice.

But anyway so far this sendgrid appears to be getting the job done versus the hostgator smtp which was not.

Tried this myself - port 587 wouldn't work but 25 would. Still waiting for the whitelabel validation but seems to be working so far.