Question

this is my first question on StackOverflow, but I think that we’ll both come to the happy end. 🙂 The problem is: I’ve got newsletter script written in PHP and when I send those emails to the various accounts they are put in the spam folder. Here is what I get in mail headers:

X-Spam-status: Yes, score=5.01 tagged_above=1 required=4.5 
tests=[HTML_FONT_SIZE_LARGE=0.001, HTML_MESSAGE=0.001, 
HTML_TAG_BALANCE_BODY=0.712, MIME_HTML_ONLY=1.105, MISSING_DATE=1.396, 
MISSING_MID=0.14, RCVD_IN_BRBL_LASTEXT=1.644,TO_EQ_FM_DOM_HTML_ONLY=0.001, 
T_FRT_CONTACT=0.01] autolearn=no

And here are my questions:

1. What is that and how to fix status RCVD_IN_BRBL_LASTEXT? I haven’t found anything informative googling that phrase.

2. How to fix MISSING_DATE status? I’ve put in the code generating whole email:

   $mailHeaders[] = "Date: ".date('Y-m-d H:i:s', time());

but with no success. “Date” fields comes only as H:i (13:45, for example) – Thunderbird 3.1.3 FYI. Searching on SO didn’t help me. I have also tried adding Delivery-Date status – still nothing.

Answer 1

RCVD_IN_BRBL_LASTEXT indicates that your email has been flagged by the Baracuda RBL, which is a service which tracks IP addresses that have been known to send spam.

Possibly your newsletter has been flagged up as spam in the past? or possibly its the ISP you’re using to route your email which has been responsible for some spam. Either way, this particular point isn’t an issue with your mail headers.

The missing date is the important one which will bring your points below the threshold.

The date format you need looks like this: Date: Wed, 15 SEP 2010 14:12:27 +0100

Most of that is self explanatory (the last bit is the time zone), and it looks like you know your way around the PHP date function, so hopefully that should sort you out. But I found this page helpful as a walk-through of a legitimate email header format.