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This did my head in so I thought it worthy of a small write up.

Here the problem: I wanted to send an email from a DRUPAL 5.12 site hosted on a home linux configured with sendmail/postfix and a SMART RELAYHOST.

Sounds simply enough.

Here is my simple test program in PHP to send an email.

<?php
$Name = "Da Duder";
$email = "dude@duder.com";
$recipient = "yo@company.com";
$mail_body = "The text for the mail...";
$subject = "Subject for reviewer";
$header = "From: ". $Name . " <" . $email . ">\r\n";
 
mail($recipient, $subject, $mail_body, $header);
?>

Doesn't get easier than that. Now this is where the fun starts. If you look at the mail log.

Mail log says postfix. I thought the problem might have been to do with my sendmail configuration so I installed postfix. It turns out that it wasn't related both suffer from the same fate.

/var/log/maillog

Dec  3 16:05:53 elmo postfix/pickup[13979]: 06BCA92EE80: uid=48 from=<apache>
Dec  3 16:05:53 elmo postfix/cleanup[14081]: 06BCA92EE80: message-id=<20081203160553.06BCA92EE80@elmo.local>
Dec  3 16:05:53 elmo postfix/qmgr[13980]: 06BCA92EE80: from=<apache@elmo.local>, size=330, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Dec  3 16:05:53 elmo postfix/smtp[14083]: 06BCA92EE80: to=<yo@company.com>, relay=smtp.blueyonder.co.uk[195.188.53.60]:25, delay=0.21, delays=0.06/0.02/0.07/0.06, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 OK id=1L7sEh-0000Yg-Kl)
Dec  3 16:05:53 elmo postfix/qmgr[13980]: 06BCA92EE80: removed

You see that the envelope-sender is actually apache@elmo.local this address is checked by yo@company.com spam's filter says “Hay that not valid I'll reject that”.

So what you need to do is tell sendmail that it should use the “from:” as the envelope sender too.

Small modification to the PHP and this is done. Why did that take me an hours to figure out? God only knows.

mail($recipient, $subject, $mail_body, $header,'-f'.$email);

So back to DRUPAL the PHP mail() function is wrapped by the function drupal_mail() in the includes/common.inc file.

So we tweak the invokation like so:

function extract_email_from($string){
  preg_match_all("/[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+@[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+/i", $string, $matches);
  return $matches[0][0];
}
 
function drupal_mail($mailkey, $to, $subject, $body, $from = NULL, $headers = array()) {
 
.. snip ..
 
    return mail(
      $to,
      mime_header_encode($subject),
      str_replace("\r", '', $body),
      join("\n", $mimeheaders),
      '-f '.extract_email_from($defaults['From'])
    );
}

Reference: http://drupal.org/node/131737, http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/179

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