All Email's Not working!!

[Pattaya City News]

YaBB SE Version: 1.5.4
PHP Version:
MySQL Version:
Server Platform: Unix, Linux, or BSD
Link to Forum: www.pattayacitynews.net/yabbse/index.php

Problem Description:
PLEASE PLEASE HELP ME.

My board is just about ready to go but I cannot get the emails working. I have contacted my host who logged in and looked at the settings and as far as they could see everything was OK.

Will an administrator please help and I will give you my admin username and password.

I hope you can help me.

[[Unknown]]

SMTP or sendmail?

Any entries in your error log?

-[Unknown]

[Pattaya City News]

I have opted for sendmail.

I have checked that it is set to sendmail in settings.php and the error log shows nothing about emails. The message:email sucessfully sent, comes up when u register or ask for password reminder.

Unknown, would you like to log in as administrator to my site?

[[Unknown]]

I don't know that that would help. (the settings in YaBB SE are probably right.)

Are you sure php.ini is configured properly for sendmail?  Are you sure sendmail is properly configured?

-[Unknown]

[Pattaya City News]

Maybe this is the problem.

I can't find php.ini anywhere on the domain or on my computer. I don't think thats a good thing!!!!

[Douglas]

On your webserver, it's usually /etc/php.ini or C:\php\php.ini.  Only your web host can make modifications to that file.

[Pattaya City News]

I just received the following message from my web provider:

"It comes to my mind that the problem may be in the way the server authenticates
senders - I'm not sure if the .php script is aware of that.

Could you please ask the guys at YabbSE about that?"

Could this be the problem?

They have also asked me to ask you about this:

"The error that the script gets when trying to send mail is:
Ran into problems sending Mail. Error: 451 See
http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html.

I'll notify our sysadmins to investigate that.
Please post this to the developers at YabbSE to check this issue and if possible
to advise."

Thanks for your help

[[Unknown]]

I thought you said sendmail?  That's an SMTP error.

YaBB SE works perfectly with authenticated SMTP.  Just put your password in, and select SMTP.

If it is sending bare LFs, I can look into that... but if you have it set to sendmail and it's causing that problem, why don't you follow the instructions on the page it said to see?

-[Unknown]

[Pattaya City News]

The webhost has been working on the problem for a few days and have sent me the following email. I don't understand it but they asked me to forward it to you.

"Last 30 min I've spent digging your YabbSE .php scripts - here is what I've
found:
- nowhere in the scripts a mail_password is defined for admin's mail
- no mail_password is used when sending mail

This is importatnt because to send a message through our SMTP server an
authentication is required - this means a username and a password should be
supplied to the mailserver.

Please post that comment to the YabbSE developers - maybe they have the server
authentication implemented in their subsequent versions of this message board
software (it is really a good one)."

Thank you YabbSE administrators for your continuing help.

[Metho]

Well, he's wrong. Here's the smtp code in Subs.php that auths the username/password for the server:

Code Select Expand

   if ($modSettings['smtp_username'] != '' && $modSettings['smtp_password'] != '')
   {
      fputs($socket, "EHLO $modSettings[smtp_host]\r\n");
      server_parse($socket, '250');
      fputs($socket, "AUTH LOGIN\r\n");
      server_parse($socket, '334');
      fputs($socket, base64_encode($modSettings['smtp_username']) . "\r\n");
      server_parse($socket, '334');
      fputs($socket, base64_encode($modSettings['smtp_password']) . "\r\n");
      server_parse($socket, '235');

Methonis

[Pattaya City News]

Thanks for that, I will pass it on

[Pattaya City News]

The webhost sent me the following:

"OK.
If this is so as the YabbSE sayd, than you will had to have a user registered
with the email [email protected] with the same password as the mailbox
password (which currently is '********' - I've set the chat*pattayacitynews.net
mailbox to check if it will start working this way).
I think it would be better if they set in a 'Settings.php' variable to hold the
admins mailbox username and password."

[Pattaya City News]

I asked them can I use the board now or what? This was their reply:

"I'm not sure it will work.
Please test it according to my last directions - I doubt it will strt working
though. I've made a suggestion how a username/password is intended to be used
for authenticating the admin's account.

I insist that no authentication arguments are passed to the mailer when a
message is sent from administrator to users using SMTP - admins password and
username are not defined anywhere (at least not at a visible and guessable
place).

I saw that there are two subsequent versions of YabbSE board - maybe the
authentication is fixed there?
There is one more thing about sending mails from users to administrator - due to
antispam measures the server was restricted to only send mails that contain in
the From: field a locally hosted domain (i.e. resolved with a server's IP). This
could block sending mails from users as they won't all have mail accounts on our
server."

[[Unknown]]

Dear web host,

The settings for the SMTP authentication have been available in YaBB SE since version 1.5.0.

Please note that these settings are not stored (as they used to be..) in Settings.php or "Forum Preferences and Settings."  Instead, these settings can be found - along with many other settings for some of the newer features - in "Installed 'Mods' Settings and Options."  It's about half way down the page, labeled "SMTP Password."

A last note is that if they SMTP password stored in the settings table is set to an empty string, YaBB SE will not attempt to use authentication.

I can cofirm that this feature of YaBB SE works because, quite simply, I use it.  My mail server is not an open relay, and I can watch the logs as YaBB SE logs in to send email.

As far as the from problem... not to worry - it sends all email from the webmaster's email address specified in "Forum Preferences and Settings."  It may, however, name the sender like so:
From: "Pattaya City News" <[email protected]>

I assume that should not be a problem because it is the standard format for such things.

Thank you for your time and consideration,
-[Unknown]

[theoscarspot.com]

I think you have the same problem that i have.  I am experiencing problems only some of the times though.  
When a new user registers an account, or when a user chooses to be notified of reply, the message that is sends out through sendmail is not iserting the FROM in the email header, and the email is being rejected as spam.

I have received several emails from the IPOWER MAILER-DAEMON (my host) telling me that it could not successfully send the email becuase it was rejected by the destination email server due to a lack of the from field.

The error looks like this:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at host81.ipowerweb.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<[email protected]>:
66.82.4.71 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 550 Body From: is missing or empty

I have posted a message for help on this topic as well.  I am not sure if this is your problem or not, but the scenarios sound similar.