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R
Raige
Participant
June 9, 2006
Question

CFMAIL issues (strange symbols)

  • June 9, 2006
  • 1 reply
  • 391 views
I'm using a very basic automated mail response for a form. It simply notifies someone that something has been submitted. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why these symbols keep appearing in the top of each email. IT wouldn't be that big of a deal honestly except that Time Warner and a few other hosts BLOCK the emails right now.

The symbols are always the same and always at the top left hand corner of the email



Any idea what's causing this? There is no special connection to the mailserver. Hotmail gets the email fine, but anyone behind Time Warner doesn't. Any suggesstions? My code is attached below. I've tried specifying the charset etc. It doesn't change this mysterious code that just... appears!
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    1 reply

    S
    SafariTECH
    Inspiring
    June 9, 2006
    The symbols are usually a product of different CHARsets between your mail server and their mail server (or browser in the case of webmail)

    i.e, an email generated using US-ASCII will show fine in Hotmail, but one using anything else (default is UTF-8) will sometimes have those characters in the top.

    Having said that, I highly doubt the TimeWarner servers are blocking the email because it has those symbols. They are more likely blocking it because it comes from a server w/o RDNS or because the X-Mailer flag is set to "ColdFusion" or because you are using an email domain that has been noted as Open in one of the Open Relay databases.

    Funny characters in the body rarely stop email from being processed.


    OR ... it may be getting through just fine and ending up in user's spam folders because it doesn't match certain criteria.

    If you are getting return mail failures, look at the messages (sometimes attached) and see what it says
    R
    RaigeAuthor
    Participant
    June 10, 2006
    Here's the setup. The company is hosted by Network Solutions.

    The email is being blocked definitely as I send it to my own @nc.rr.com account and it never reaches, yet it does at my hotmail account. I keep an active look into my junk mail and seeing how i ran the code 14 times using various settings and my @nc.rr.com account recieved none, I'm pretty sure it's being blocked for some reason.

    What would you suggest in a CFMAIL tag to prevent this sort of problem?
    S
    SafariTECH
    Inspiring
    June 10, 2006
    Have you sent an email to RR's support to find out what is going on. RR is notoriously bad for blocking emails based on their own somewhat paranoid concepts. I have seen lots of complaints from RR users who hate their email service because many things they sign up for never arrive, and many have left RR because of it.

    Just because the site is hosted at NetworkSolutions doesn't necessarily mean the mail server is RDNS'd either; although you would think they would be.

    If you can view the mail logs, they will likely show reasons why it was blocked, and if I remember right, RR places a response in the submitting mail server's logs that tells how to submit an inquiry into the issue.

    You could try altering the mailerid in the CFMAIL tag, but that may not do anything, or could actually cause more harm if the header tries to fake itself as something else.

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