I'm switching a web app over to AmazonSES. We're using PHP 5.3, PHPMailer, and we tried using the AmazonSES pear package but for some reason it was unbelievably slow on the live server. We switched to the Amazon perl script thats use sendmail instead and it's much faster.
However, the Undisclosed Recipients feature (built in to AmazonSES pear code) was no longer available. No matter what I do, the only thing I can get working it by addressing an email as "To: Undisclosed Recipients <workingadd#domain.com>"
The problem is that the working address HAS to be there: php's mail() func require it, phpmailer requires it. The problem is, using noreply# fails, but workingaddress# works. While the recipient list is protected, we end up getting all the emails at that address.
However, the Amazon code managed to send mails without a primary address. I can't find anything in their code that suggests the answer, nor on the net.
Please help!
Oh, You want to send mail, Please careful that MTAs don't you as SPAM, if you want to know all of its rules please read all of rules of SpamHaus
Set up an interim relay server with postfix or sendmail. Have your application send emails to that server. Have that server connect to amazon and send the mail to it. Let it handle the authentication, etc. It works extremely well.
--David
Related
I am pretty new with the options of sending email via PHP code. The options available are sendmail, postfix, and PHPMail. If I use sendmail and postfix this means that I have to use PHP's mail function. I don't know about PHPMail. I will be sending email across domains (hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc). It's an automatic email sent to a user's email after they completed something (say a registration). What do you guys think about this?
I've tried setting up sendmail in my Ubuntu server, but had some difficulties in setting it up. So that's why I am probably looking for more options.
You need a MTA (mail transport agent) on your machine (sendmail, postifx, ...) or you can connect to a mail provider like gmail using SMTP.
PHPMailer might be a good class for sending emails if you're not using any framework.
PHPMailer is on Google Code and GitHub.
You should have a pretty easy time setting up sendmail on ubuntu
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=196112
This gives the basics it takes to get sendmail installed.
If you are running this server from your house or some non-datacenter there is a chance that your ISP is blocking the port numbers you need such as port 25.
Read through that thread and it should give you some good suggestions for issues you may have.
I have a VPS server at UltimateHosting.com and requires that I use "Smart Relay". I cant seem to wrap my head around how I setup php to be able to use mail relay.
Here is an article they have on Smart Relay:
http://support.ultrahosting.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=142
The server is using cpanel and exim
I sent the following support ticket:
How do I configure the server to send
mail using php. I am writting a script
that will send the users passwsord
usigng PHPs mail function. However the
emails sent are never delivered. Does
this have to do with "smart relay"?
Any guide on how to configure this?
Response was:
While we do not provide scripting
support of any kind, if you simply
ensure the smart host is hard coded in
your script (no authentication is
necessary) the email should be
forwarded accordingly.
If your script uses the server's SMTP
server to send out email, you'll have
to ensure the MTA is configured to use
the smart host
.
Could anyone please clarify what I need to do in order to fix this?
I got the answer on ServerFault see https://serverfault.com/questions/188840/configrue-exim-sendmail-for-relay for details.
In short, I needed to change the default generic hostname and apply the route relay
I have some problems with the email system for CodeIgniter:
First, the emails I send out (registration, confirmations) are getting caught in standard spam filters in gmail and other mail clients. How do I get around this? How do companies like Facebook get their emails through consistently?
Second, the mailer is working locally but once we deploy it it no longer runs (doesn't send emails) but all the other forms run just fine. Anyone ever run into a problem like this?
Thanks for all the help!
I can't really answer your first question - it's not specific to CodeIgniter. You just need to make sure your email doesn't look like spam. In short - there's no way of guaranteeing your e-mail will not end up in a spam filter.
As for the second question, I expect your production server needs to be configured properly for email. You probably need to configure CodeIgniter to send email properly. I would suggest setting up an SMTP server (or using an existing one) rather than using the standard PHP mail which I think CodeIgniter uses by default.
Regarding spam, most organisations are very secretive about how they prevent spam (not wanting to publish information which helps the spammers) and in some cases they don't actually know - an obvious examlpe of this is bayesian filtering - but, for example, hotmail use a completely unaccountable army of volunteers to manually classify emails.
Do and get a copy of spamassassin and try to reverse engineer how the standard rules work. Obvious things to check are:
1) AVOIDING LOTS OF CAPITALS
2) don't mention the 'V' word
3) make sure you've got a current and restrictive SPF 1.0 policy published
4) make sure your sending from an address which has A and PTR DNS records
5) Do provide a reply-to and from email address which use your domain in the address
the mailer is working locally but once we deploy it it no longer runs
doesn't send emails
Which? These are 2 totally seperate things. If the code is falling over (if so why have you not provided the error details) then its likely a PHP version issue or a problem with the connection to the MTA (or the PHP mail config).
The latter is a problem with the MTA itself.
99.9% of problems reported as PHP mail failures have nothing to do with PHP and are problems with the MTA.
Enabled detailled error reporting for your MTA and see where it is failing.
C.
You may have to configure the email on your server differently than your local development environment. I've had to in the past.
There are two basic ways that PHP can send mail:
Via a UNIX program called "sendmail" (only on non-Windows servers and only if it is installed - check with your hosting provider)
Via a SMTP server.
If you've configured CodeIgniter to use SENDMAIL, check to ensure that the Sendmail path is correct. Your hosting provider usually provides this somewhere in their online documentation.
If you're using SMTP, you need to make sure that your server can contact the SMTP server. You can do this by logging into the server via SSH and typing "telnet your.smtpserver.com 25". If you get an error message about not being able to connect, you know you have a problem with your hosting provider connecting to your mail server.
I've been able to diagnose this problem by enabling logging on my production server (http://bit.ly/4pprd6) and adding log_message('error', $this->email->print_debugger()) right after I attempt to send a message.
i tried googling but sadly i get only documentations (or am i using bad keywords)
anyway
i can see that alot of programmers (even those im working with right now) does not seem to approve to using the php native mail function and resorts to using some other framework like sendmail? swift mailer etc...
i'd like to know why? are there really disadvantages to using the native mail function?
if so how does the mailing frameworkds solve that or how are they better??
There's nothing wrong with it for sending simple plain text emails.
However, once you get into multipart mime emails (say, you want an HTML version or to add an attachment) then you have to build the email yourself, and it can be quite tricky to get all the headers and encoding correct. In this case you're better off using a library.
The PHP manual for function mail mentions that there are some restrictions with the mail function and one of these are that the function opens and closes an SMTP socket for each email. The mail function works good when you just want to send a mail or two.
As far as I'm concerned, all of these problems pale in comparison to the major security problem:
Mail header injection: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_injection , and php specific info: http://www.damonkohler.com/2008/12/email-injection.html )
Whereby a spammer bot spiders your site and, finding a vulnerability in your script that is easy to still have when using the very insecure mail() function, IS ABLE TO SEND EMAIL FROM YOUR SERVER TO AN ARBITRARY LIST OF CONTACTS, essentially turning your script & server into a cog in their spam email machine.
I recommend never using mail() with user input, and in general, just making use of PEAR::mail instead. http://pear.php.net/package/Mail/
Using PHP's mail() function requires a properly configured sendmail or equivalent on the host the program is running. However, the Windows implementation is a bit different. If you don't have your MTA configured properly, you won't be able to successfully send emails from your PHP scripts. Like another commenter said on this thread, PHP manual explicitly states that each call to the mail() function opens and closes a socket. This can cause unnecessary delay in script execution.
Additionally, your development and testing environment may not have a public static IP address. Your IP address might be blacklisted by DNSBL, Gmail, Yahoo! and other popular email service providers.
Your best bet in this situation is to use a properly configured external SMTP server. Chances are your employer has already provided an email account with SMTP access. If you don't have one you can use a Gmail account. Gmail provides SMTP access to all email accounts.
You can write scripts to open a socket connection to the external SMTP server. When there are tried and tested open source libraries for this purpose, why write your own?
Incidentally, I wrote a blog post on the very same subject yesterday: Using SMTP With Zend Framework - Solve Email Delivery Problem
Best regards,
Hi I have been reading alot of articles adoring the PEAR mail package and it seems like PEAR is something I need to try out.
I am interested in setting up a full mail server, similar to a conventional SMTP mail service; which incorporates mail queuing, resending with a backend database etc. My impression is that PEAR can do this but can its service be used with mail clients like outlook to send mail, just as how any any smtp server daemon can where one would enter a portnumber, server name and/or security protocol?
Thanks
No, PEAR isn't going to magically solve these problems for you.
PEAR is a collection of PHP classes that are meant to solve common problems faced by PHP users. The Mail packages offer code for interacting with different parts Email systems. They do not contain code for creating email systems from scratch.
For example, form the Mail_Queue documentation
The Mail_Queue class puts mails in a temporary container, waiting to be fed to the MTA (Mail >Transport Agent), and sends them later (e.g. a certain amount of mails every few minutes) by >crontab or in other way.
The MTA in this case in sendmail, postfix, etc.
Another example, from the Mail_Mbox documentation
It can split messages inside a Mbox, return the number of messages, return,
update or remove an specific message or add a message on the Mbox
Incorrect use of "an" aside, you are using this to read existing MBOX files, and not caring how they got there.
The Mail package is about interacting with existing mail systems, NOT creating replacements. You'll still need to understand how all those email systems work to create a "full mail server, similar to a conventional SMTP mail service". If you're doing this because you want to learn how email systems work, have at it. If you're doing this because you thing this will give your business some leg up in the email game, I laugh and say "good luck with that"
PEAR is a repository for lots of libraries. Some of them deal with mailing.
PEAR's Mail class is designed for sending mail only. It is not designed as an implementation of an SMTP server.
Pear Mail is an SMTP sender aka client, not an SMTP server. Although it's entirely possible to write server (any kind of server) in php that doesn't mean that writing an SMTP server yourself is necessarily a good idea as it requires quite some expertise to do it right (spam anyone?). If you want to see an SMTP server implemented in a scripting language, go have a look at Lamson, written in Python by Zed Shaw.
And while you're there, do read the About page. This quote says it all
However, as great as Lamson is for
processing email intelligently, it
isn’t the best solution for delivering
mail. There is 30+ years of SMTP lore
and myth stored in the code of mail
servers such as Postfix and Exim that
would take years to replicate and make
efficient. Being a practical project,
Lamson defers to much more capable
SMTP servers for the grunt work of
getting the mail to the final
recipient.
It seems to me that PEAR's MailQueue package may address your needs.