[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #5007: Email notifications fail on hosted sites that check sender address

[WordPress Trac]

#5007: Email notifications fail on hosted sites that check sender address
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 Reporter:  jlwarlow                         |        Owner:  pishmishy
     Type:  defect (bug)                     |       Status:  assigned 
 Priority:  normal                           |    Milestone:  2.9      
Component:  General                          |      Version:  2.2.2    
 Severity:  minor                            |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:  e-mail notification sender spam  |  
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Comment(by tigertech):

 Replying to [comment:35 westi]:
 > I think we should close this ticket now we have that documentaion and
 there is a filter available for the % of sites where the current method
 doesn't work.

 I'd like to object to closing this.

 Having WordPress make up a fake address to send from, and then documenting
 that it doesn't work some of the time, is not a reasonable resolution to
 this problem.

 Other scripts don't work this way. They either ask the user for a working
 address that the script is allowed to send from, or they just use the
 default setting without specifying any address, like WordPress originally
 did.

 I run the mail system for a Web hosting company, and I can report that
 many extremely popular scripts send automated mail with no particular
 address set, allowing the system to fill in a valid address. The authors
 of those scripts expect it to work properly on properly configured
 servers, and it does; our mail logs show over 50,000 successful outgoing
 messages per day like this.

 Because of that, I find it hard to believe that the original FastHosts
 problem (where they were blocking mail from scripts that didn't set a
 specific address) is widespread. The original bug here was not a WordPress
 problem, but rather a spam filtering bug at FastHosts that would prevent
 mail from being sent from many scripts. Heck, that system would prevent 3
 of the 4 documentation examples for PHP's mail() function from working.

 If the default address set on a server for script sending isn't allowed to
 send mail, that's a serious misconfiguration on the part of the hosting
 company, not something that WordPress should try to "fix" by making up a
 (probably nonexistent) address to send from.

 The right solution is either to either ask the user for a working address
 that the script is allowed to send from, or to revert the original change
 so that WordPress uses the default address.

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5007#comment:36>
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