SMTP problems...
I have a dedicated server at MidWestWebHost.com (managed, though the support can't help me... and I start to get disappointed with them) and am experiencing what I believe to be a problem with the SMTP.
First a mailing list/follow-up autoresponder is a software that catches all the emails that it receives and starts to send them messages from time to time... (and no, it doesn't have to be SPAM, really!)
So what I do is I have a form on my web site where people fill in their name and email. Then I create a blank email message and insert their name and email in the FROM field. Then I send this email message to different mailing lists/follow-up autoresponders that are signed up for my exchange program.
Everything is legal and all subscribers know exactly what they do.
To sum up everything, John Doe fills in the form. What I do is send a blank message containg John Doe and his email in the FROM field. I send this message to list@somedomain.com.
What should happen now is John Doe to be added to this list/autoresponder.
But most of the times it doesn't happen. And when it happens in most cases (if not in all) his name is being added like (John Doe) not John Doe... and I can't figure out where these brackets come from.
Anyways, there are two problems:
1) Why does John Doe never gets added to those lists when my software sends the message and he gets added without any problems when for example I send the message from Outlook Express or when I use my software from another server. So obviously it's not my software and I suppose it has somthing to do with the SMTP.
2) Why when he gets added to some of the lists, the list puts his name in brackets. Probably it's something in the way I send his name, may be the way I create the FROM field of the blank email message.
Well, these are basically my main problems right now.
The support has told me that #2 has something to do with my forms:
<form method="post" action="http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?a=somevariable>
You cannot pass variables in the action statement. To correctly pass on that variable, you need to do this:
<form method="post" action="http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi"><input type="hidden" name="a" value="somevariable">
Now, I suppose it's right. But if the form was wrong, why it puts the names and all the other data into the database without any problems?
Well, that's all I can tell... not because I'm hiding something, but because I don't know anything else
... though it's not that funny.Thanks for your time. Really!
And I look forward to hearing what you think.
