I'm posting this on behalf of magetek. He got signed up but is now having difficulty posting too! He's tried twice and gotten bumped back out of the thread to the forum board. firefly end. Magetek start: I have tried that as well as turning off the junk mail filter settings. Hotmail will still not accept messages from here. Same thing with Excite. Most correctly configured mail servers will not accept mail messages without a To header field as the message is technically incorrect. Luckily (in this case) my ISP doesn't know how to spell the word configure much less implement it so I managed to sign up using one of my accounts from them. Usually messages are not placed in a user's dropbox immediately but go through one or more mail relays first and/or may have further processing done on them. Without the To field there is no way for the relay agent or processing agent to know who the message is destined for. You can test this by telneting to your SMTP server and typing the following: (Replace somedomain and someuser as appropriate) ... start session ... HELO somedomain MAIL FROM: someuser@somedomain RCPT TO: someuser@hotmail.com DATA Test . ... end session ... The above message will not get processed. ... start session ... HELO somedomain MAIL FROM: someuser@somedomain RCPT TO: someuser@hotmail.com DATA To: someuser@hotmail.com From: someuser@somedomain Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 12:00:00 -0500 Subject: Test Test . ... end session ... The above message will get processed even with junk mail filters turned on. Additionally using the address ebot@renderosity.com for sending signup links and notices to ones users is asking for trouble. I can see a lot of mail servers and/or email client rules set up to filter out the word 'bot'. I have quite a few filters set up on my server and bot is right near the top of the list. It may be better to use signup@renderosity.com or registration@renderosity.com for example for new users. It's a simple change (one line addition) to the mail script so I don't see what the problem is here. I agree with firefly about the loss of users. Most aren't going to want to change their (already working) email client settings in order to receive email.