Hi

I have problems sending out mails to some mail servers. This is Hotmail, Yahoo, Aol and more.
I get this notification from Limesurvey. I have no problems sending mails from “gigahost” to Hotmail. But when using Limesurvey, they don’t get through.
I get this information back:

This is the mail system at host web5.gigahost.dk.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.
The mail system
< Dit e-mail adres is beschermd door spambots, u heeft Javascript nodig om dit onderdeel te kunnen bekijken >: host mx1.hotmail.com[65.54.245.8] said: 550 SC-002 Mail
rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. The mail server IP
connecting to Windows Live Hotmail has exhibited namespace mining behavior.
If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet
Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit

Do anyone know what the problem is?

Which email method did you set in config.php?

We are using Limesurvey 1.70, and I can’t find anything about any email method in the new config.php.
Is it possible that the problem is with our webhost?

1. There are three kinds of email: SMTP, PHP mail() and another one. You can set in config.php which one you want to use. See manual -> installation on how to configure limesurvey.

2. The problem can be connected to your host but check your settings first.

I think the file that you are referring to is config-defaults.php, and here the mail setting is “mail” we are using PHPMailer [version 1.73]

Should we use sendmail, or smtp instead?

Motion Media wrote:
Should we use sendmail, or smtp instead?
Just give it a try to see if another email method can solve the problem.

Any progress?

Problem solved (how?)?

At the moment we are testing different kinds of options, none of them has been of any succes. At the moment we are trying to set up the SMTP relay, and see if that would work.
We are not sure, but we assume that hotmail reads the mail header, sees it has been generated by PHPmailer or sendmail, and then rejects it as spam?

We will keep you posted

Xantoz wrote:
We are not sure, but we assume that hotmail reads the mail header, sees it has been generated by PHPmailer or sendmail, and then rejects it as spam?
Definately possible.
Maybe changing the email provider will solve the problem. You can use the forum search to see which providers are used successfully by other users.

Finally we found a solution to our problem. I did a new installation at another hosting company, called “Surftown” and here the mail goes right through to hotmail, what a relief.

The hosting company we had trouble with was “Gigahost”, and they didn’t even bother to answer our mail, so it was impossible for us to debug on the problem.

So the problem was not in Limesurvey 1.7, but the webhoster that we used.