Forum Registration Difficulties

Some users are having difficulty with receiving their confirmation emails. The problem appears to be with the way SMF is building the email header and some types of MTAs.

If you’re having problems, please email [email protected] from the email you registered your forum acount with and include your forum user name, and we’ll manually activate the account.

Thanks and sorry for the problems.

everyone go to #modx on freenode ! let’s get this going!

FYI, I am seeing several bounced messages from MTA saying something along the lines of:

A problem was found in an Email message you sent.
This Email scanner intercepted it and stopped the entire message
reaching its destination.

The problem was reported to be:

Disallowed  characters found in MIME headers


Please contact your IT support personnel with any queries regarding this
policy.

Your message was sent with the following envelope:

MAIL FROM: [email protected]
RCPT TO:   [email protected]

... and with the following headers:

---
MAILFROM: [email protected]
Received: from unknown (HELO www.vertexworks.com) (69.56.143.164)
  by blah.blah.dz with AES256-SHA encrypted SMTP; 14 Feb 2006 19:17:40 +0100
Received: (qmail 30882 invoked by uid 48); 14 Feb 2006 18:28:30 -0000
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Registration Reminder
From: "MODx Community Forums" <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:28:30 +0000
X-Mailer: SMF
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1


---

I cannot find anything in the headers to indicate they are not fully compliant with the RFC email header spec, so I have no choice but to delete these accounts as they can’t be verified. If you don’t see messages, you might try one of the free email services like gmail, hotmail or yahoo, with which we’ve had zero issues.

Similarly, mailboxes that are unavailable or over quota for more than a few days will also have to have their accounts deleted. The good news is that you can always re-register at a later date when they’re available again.

And lastly, the folks that use a mail authentication system like the ones from earthlink will also most likely fall victim to having the accounts deleted. We just can’t always catch them but we try. Sorry...

Thanks for your understanding.

You might consider getting The Planet to set up the MTA server so that the FROM name in the SMTP header (which is currently "www.vertexworks.com") matches the reverse DNS entry for 69.56.143.164 (which is "vertextworks.com"). Not to imply that it’ll fix all the problems, but it’ll certainly deliver to systems that reject connections from hosts that they perceive to have bogus reverse DNS entries.

Victor,

That is a very good point!

Many host is now using a reverse DNS look up to verify the sender and if it fail the reverse test it will treat it as a spam message and will bounce.

When you see this "unknown" in the header it will be bounced:
from unknown (HELO www.vertexworks.com) (69.56.143.164)