Hotmail rejects Sellerdeck emails

[nickr54]

Hi,
It seems there are changes at hotmail wrt to emails sent
One of my regular customers who has a hotmail.com email account did not receive their order confirmation email nor my confirmation emails from within the Actinic ecommerce windows client - I use v9 for my live ecommerce site - but the problem is not restricted to that version, I have also tested with SellerDeck 2013 with the same resulting failure.

I then receive automated "Mail delivery failed" messages from hotmail.

I can reproduce the problem with my own test hotmail account and also with a test site on the same host using SellerDeck 2013 and PC client, so it is not the customers specific hotmail account causing the problem. I suspect something has changed at hotmail, maybe to do with the outlook/hotmail/live merger etc.

I can send the same message from the same SMTP server at my web host via webmail or a pop3 client to the same hotmail accounts with no problem. So its not a problem with IP blacklisting etc.

So it seem hotmail suddenly doesn't now like the way the Actinic site's scripts put the email message together.

None of my Actinic settings have changed and customers not on hotmail are fine.

The detailed rejection is:

Envelope-to: eShop@ClearSystems.co.uk
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:36:07 +0000
X-Failed-Recipients: fred_dugwort@hotmail.com
Auto-Submitted: auto-replied
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@zen.co.uk>
To: eShop@ClearSystems.co.uk
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender


This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.


A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:


fred_dugwort@hotmail.com
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host mx3.hotmail.com [65.54.188.126]: 550 5.7.0 (BAY0-MC4-F38) Message could not be delivered. Please ensure the message is RFC 5322 compliant.


------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

The cpanel email trace shows:

Delivery Event Details
Event: success success
User: c0113938
Domain: clearsystems.co.uk
Sender: eshop@clearsystems.co.uk
Sent Time: Sep 11, 2013 12:36:12 PM
Sender Host: shcp04.hosting.zen.net.uk
Sender IP: 82.71.204.28
Authentication: dovecot_login
Spam Score:
Recipient: fred_dugwort@hotmail.com
Delivery User: -remote-
Delivery Domain:
Delivered To: fred_dugwort@hotmail.com
Router: lookuphost
Transport: remote_smtp
Out Time: Sep 11, 2013 12:36:12 PM
ID: 1VJiiL-0001Yh-QE
Delivery Host: cpanelsmarthost.zen.co.uk
Delivery IP: 82.71.204.227
Size: 3.52 KB
Result: Message accepted

[Mike Hughes]

There is some some discussion of other systems having similar problems. One problem seems to have been because there was a blank 'reply to' field. I don't knownif actinic does this but you could send yourself and email via actinic and see if you can spot any missing info.

Mike

[nickr54]

There is some some discussion of other systems having similar problems. One problem seems to have been because there was a blank 'reply to' field. I don't knownif actinic does this but you could send yourself and email via actinic and see if you can spot any missing info.

Mike

Nope, looks good to me:

Envelope-to: nickr@clearsystems.co.uk
Date: 11 Sep 2013 17:58:59 GMT
From: eShop @ clearsystems.co.uk
Subject: Clear Systems Limited : Order MA14PE80002217 : CSLDirectShip
To: nickr@clearsystems.co.uk
Reply-To: eShop @ clearsystems.co.uk


Another test - anything missing?

I'd be interested if any one else has the same problem - you could try a new email from the PC client for any order, replace all the text with "this is a test" and send to fred_dugwort@hotmail.com

[nickr54]

The cause is found

There is some some discussion of other systems having similar problems. One problem seems to have been because there was a blank 'reply to' field. I don't knownif actinic does this but you could send yourself and email via actinic and see if you can spot any missing info.

Mike

Aha, that pointed me in the right direction ...
I found it. In an early attempt to discourage spammers screen scraping the email address from the web-site our return email had a space either side of the @. Up until now hotmail accepted emails with the from email address in this format. Since then newer revision of Actinic / SellerDeck don't force you to show the configured email address in the info etc pages and we've modified our Info and Contact Us pages accordingly.