Thread

Hi folks,
I am trying to trouble shoot in order to find out why I can not get sendmail to work in ee.
I am trying to work with Media Temple support and my Media Temple DV account with Plesk control panel. They first suggest I verify the following:

Can some one verify the path that ee uses is /usr/sbin/sendmail

Thanks and have a GREAT day!

Yes, if sendmail is selected, /usr/sbin/sendmail is the path used.  When you try to use it, with Email Debugging turned on, what error messages do you receive?

No error messages. Reports mail sent successfully. It is never received. phpmail works fine.

I suspect this is an issue with MT, sendmail and plesk. Just trying to narrow it down to make their techs happy.

If it’s reporting as sent, that means that the server has accepted the handoff from ExpressionEngine, at which point it’s out of EE’s hands.  The host should really be able to provide you with more detailed information on the failure by examining their logs.  May I ask which version of ExpressionEngine you are using?

1.6.5 ... havent upgraded to 1.6.6 yet.

No changes to sendmail were made between those two versions, so you’re good there.  I’d inspect the server logs and see what’s happening after EE hands the email off to sendmail.

When I try to send using smtp I get the following error:
Debugging Message
220 realestatefanatics.com ESMTP

hello: 250-realestatefanatics.com
250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-STARTTLS
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
from: 250 ok
to: 250 ok
to: 250 ok
data: 354 go ahead
451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.
Failed to send SMTP email. Error: 451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.
Unable to send email using SMTP

Well, SMTP is going to go through different systems than sendmail would, but the error message indicates that this SMTP server is using qmail, and you might have success by opening /system/core/core.email.php and changing both $newline and $crlf to “\r\n”.

Following is the kind and thoughtful reply I got from an MT tech with regard to my inability to get sendmail to work in EE;

Mike,

I am sorry but this script is too complex for me to trouble shoot any further.  I am not sure why it would not work but throw no error when being sent through sent mail.  I can find nothing in the error logs that might explain what is going on.

One interesting thing you should know is that php’s mail function also uses sendmail.  The path is set in the php.ini file. So, the issue is actually not with Sendmail itself but with how the script is using it through the “sendmail mode”. Although no error is generated it really does look like the email is never reaching the outgoing mail server.

In the maillogs,  when an email is generated by a script the mail log will show the user that started the email was Apache.  Going through your mail logs I can see 2 instances of this today.  This would seem to imply that only twice did a script running on a website hosted on your server successfully generate an email and send it to your mail server to be delivered. Since it did work that means the general functionality of sendmail is working.

Those two times he is referring to were when I used phpmail.

Any ideas?
Have a GREAT day!

Capt.Mike,

Have you tried Derek’s suggestion on making the changes in core.email.php?

-greg

Derek’s suggestion was with regard to smtp mail not sendmail.

It might be a factor with sendmail as well, Capt. Mike.  Please give it a try.  Does the host have a working script (in any scripting language) of how to use sendmail on their servers?  I can modify the core email class for you to attempt to retrieve a console error, but via popen() in PHP it’s not very reliable, so other options should be exhausted first.

Making the following change resolved the smtp issue.

opening /system/core/core.email.php and changing both $newline and $crlf to “\r\n”.

Thank you very much.

However, when sending using sendmail it still reports mail sent successfully with no errors reported however, the email is never received at the destination email addresses.

I have requested from MT support an example script, preferably in php that they know works on their dv hosting accounts.

Thanks for you help and patience with this you guys.

Ok, let’s see if we can gain a proper status message.  Open core.email.php and on line 1308 replace:

pclose($fp) >> 8 & 0xFF;

With:

$status = pclose($fp);

if (version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '4.2.3') == -1)
{
    $status = $status >> 8 & 0xFF;
}

$this->add_error_message('Status: '.$status.'.');

if ($status == 0)
{
    if ($this->get_debug())
    {
        $this->add_error_message("Unable to open a socket to Sendmail. Please check settings.");
    }

    return FALSE;
}

And then try to send an email from the Communicate page with Sendmail, and Email Debugging enabled.  Success or fail, the status message will hopefully give us a pointer towards the problem.

Derek,
in my text editor(Crimson Editor) for ee 1.6.5 core.email.php the line with those values is in the /**  Send using Sendmail section and is line 1236. It reads;

      pclose($fp) >> 8 & 0xFF;

Is that the correct line that you want me to change?