The Open Source Ministry Blog

Some say that AOL belongs in one of the lower levels of Dante’s inferno. I agree, but I doubt they are there to receive punishment. They are doling it out. While demons are fishing for grafters in the boiling pitch of Bolgia 5 in Circle 8 (accessible via the Congressional Subway), AOL is blocking emails to uninformed users and sticking horrible junk on their computers with their foul free CD’s promising eternal free hours in exchange for their souls.

However, the dank odor of AOL often reaches the nose of the holiest and geekiest of computer users. When we aren’t explaining to people how AOL disks foul up your computer simply by placing them in your CD drive we are trying to keep our mail from being blocked.

AOL’s latest scheme is to stop spammers by bouncing emails using certain default Return-Paths. Spammers respond by changing the Return-Path in their spam-cannons. We who use web forms, however, must figure how to get around it.

I believe I have the way right here.

I have not sent this to a real AOL email account, but I have tested it with my aim.com account which I assume has settings similar to AOL.com.

The results of my testing point to using the -f option in the additional_parameters area (located immediately to the right of the additional headers.
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers, $additional_parameters);
where
$additional_parameters = “-f $from”;

To support this, I sent the following test emails through the server here at OSMinistry.com.
Notice that I sent using a Gmail.com address so the address had no real connection to the server it was sending from.

These did NOT go through:

No additional headers, No -f option.
mail("email@aim.com",
"Subject: No has no additional anything",
"Message: Email 1 - just basics");

Did not have the -f option, but had additional headers

mail("email@aim.com",
"Subject: No -f",
"Message: Email 2 - Just Reply To and From",
"From: \"Bob Brown\" <my-email@gmail.com>\r\n"
."Reply-To: my-email@gmail.com\r\n"
."X-Mailer: PHP Contact Form");

These DID go through:
Contains extended headers and the -f option
mail("email@aim.com",
"Subject: Has -f",
"Message: Email 3 - Reply To, From, and -f",
"From: \"Bob Brown\" <my-email@gmail.com>\r\n"
."Reply-To: my-email@gmail.com\r\n"
."X-Mailer: PHP Contact Form",
"-f my-email@gmail.com");

Has no X-Mailer, extended headers, and -f option
mail("email@aim.com",
"Subject: Has -f, but no X-Mailer",
"Message: Email 4 - Reply To, and From, and -f",
"From: \"Bob Brown\" <my-email@gmail.com>\r\n"
."Reply-To: my-email@gmail.com\r\n",
"-f my-email@gmail.com");

Has no extended headers (but there is a space for them), but it does have the -f option.
mail("email@aim.com",
"Subject: Has no additional headers",
"Message: Email 5 - just -f","",
"-f my-email@gmail.com");

Using a fake domain in the Return-Path kept it from going through, and using a regular address from my domain got it flagged with a “?” so perhaps I need to get something changed on the server to confirm return path checks.

So, if someone can test this (the whole -f thingie that is) while aiming at a regular aol.com address let me know what works.
Thanks, and enjoy.