Thread

Hey all, I have a guitar community website (http://www.activemelody.com) in which users can sign up for an account.  It’s a pretty standard sign up process in that the user receives a confirmation email and verifies their email by clicking on the link that is emailed to them.

The problem that I’m running into is that it seems only about 60% of the the people that sign up are able to actually receive the confirmation.  I have 20 or so emails that end up in “pending” every day.  I realize that some of those in the “pending” state are spam, but I do get emails every day from people saying they never received the confirmation.  It seems like gmail and yahoo email accounts receive the bulk of these.

So my question is, is this a function of my webhost (MediaTemple), Expression Engine, or the Solspace User plugin that I’m using (that’s the module that I use for people to sign up), and is there anything anyone can recommend I do to eliminate some of this? Surely some of the big sites out there (like this one) that use Media Temple for building a community have a workaround?

Any help most appreciated!

I’d say its most likely an issue at the receiving end with emails landing up in spam folders. You already know people do receive confirmation emails so you know everything is working your end.

This sort of problem affects many similar sites and I’ve had to deal with the very same on numerous occasions. What I’ve found are the main reasons:

1. Spam signups
2. Emails being filtered to spam folders
3. Emails are received but users simply don’t see them in their mailboxes
4. Wrong address, typos etc

Hi sherrils,

Bluedreamer’s comments are relevant and I would imagine that those reasons account for a certain proportion of these non-receipts. However, which method are you using to send out your site emails (PHP, Sendmail or SMTP)? You will probably find that for the most compatibility with 3rd party providers you will need to be using an SMTP account that is on the same domain as your site.

Cheers

Greg

@Rob, thanks for the help