While writing a small mail application in PHP i noticed i couldn’t send mail from my local machine. Even with telnet i couldn’t send out emails. I quickly found out that postfix and sendmail on the same system is not a good idea. Seems it was a left over from some testing i did. So after wiping sendmail and postfix from the system. And reinstalling only postfix i got an error when starting Postfix

postfix: fatal: /etc/postfix/postfix-script: No such file or directory

So let’s try and completely remove the postfix package and purge all files.

$ sudo dpkg –remove postfix
$ sudo dpkg –purge postfix

And a clean install of postfix:

$ sudo apt-get -V install postfix

Now i can telnet in and try to send some mail. And this seemed to work. The mail got delivered.

$ telnet localhost 25

Trying 127.0.0.1…
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 0×0 ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)

helo test.nl
250 0×0
mail from: t...@test.nl
250 2.1.0 Ok
rcpt to: some@working.address
250 2.1.5 Ok
data
354 End data with
testing
.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as ED97311C412F

So now let’s make sure it also works from PHP. I tested it through a CLI script and through apache2. With the most basic mail script you can imagine.

    mail('some@working.address', 'test', 'test message');

The mail however gets bounced.

Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/pickup[10249]: 035BF11C4133: uid=1 from=
Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/cleanup[11726]: 035BF11C4133: message-id=<20090107213148.035BF11C4133@0x0>
Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/qmgr[10250]: 035BF11C4133: from=<dae...@internal.name>, size=303, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/smtp[11728]: 035BF11C4133: to=, relay=working.mail.server[xx.xxx.xx.xx]:25, delay=0.68, delays=0.02/0/0.48/0.18, dsn=5.0.0, status=bounced (host working.mail.server[xx.xxx.xx.xx] said: 553 sorry, your envelope sender domain must exist (#5.7.1) (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/cleanup[11726]: C5C2911C4134: message-id=<20090107213148.C5C2911C4134@0x0>
Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/qmgr[10250]: C5C2911C4134: from=<>, size=2064, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/bounce[11729]: 035BF11C4133: sender non-delivery notification: C5C2911C4134
Jan 7 22:31:48 0×0 postfix/qmgr[10250]: 035BF11C4133: removed
Jan 7 22:31:49 0×0 postfix/smtp[11728]: C5C2911C4134: to=<dae...@internal.name>, relay=working.mail.server[xx.xxx.xx.xx]:25, delay=0.75, delays=0.01/0/0.41/0.34, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 ok 1231363909 qp 10204)
Jan 7 22:31:49 0×0 postfix/qmgr[10250]: C5C2911C4134: removed

From looking at the log files i can tell it bounced because the from address is set to dae...@internal.name. And internal.name is not known by my mail server. Let’s try that again. But this time specifically set the FROM header.

    $headers .= 'To: Name ' . "\n";
    $headers .= 'From: test ' . "\n";
    mail('some@working.address', 'test', 'test message', $headers);

The result is the same. The FROM header didn’t change at all. So although it’s possible to set the from header. The message is always send by a system user.. So after doing some research on Google about this problem it seems possible to pass an extra parameter to the mail() function. This parameter can contain a string which will be passed to the postfix binary as an extra parameter. So adding -fsome@orking.address makes the problem go away.

Jan 7 22:36:58 0×0 postfix/pickup[10249]: 687CA11C4133: uid=1 from=
Jan 7 22:36:58 0×0 postfix/cleanup[11847]: 687CA11C4133: message-id=<20090107213658.687CA11C4133@0x0>
Jan 7 22:36:58 0×0 postfix/qmgr[10250]: 687CA11C4133: from=, size=276, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Jan 7 22:36:59 0×0 postfix/smtp[11849]: 687CA11C4133: to=, relay=working.mail.server[xx.xxx.xx.xx]:25, delay=1.4, delays=0.02/0/0.59/0.76, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 ok 1231364219 qp 10582)
Jan 7 22:36:59 0×0 postfix/qmgr[10250]: 687CA11C4133: removed

But this would mean that i always have to pass the extra parameter. And if i use a third party class or function. i may not be able to do so without hacking the code. So although it solves the problem it’s not the final solution. After i bit of browsing i found out that changing the myorigin parameter in /etc/postfix/main.cf to a known mail server. I could start the send out mail. So i changed it to the domain my mail server runs under.

myorigin = mail.server

And now sending mail from PHP works.

It’s been a while since i last wrote something. I just couldn’t put my self to it. The last two weeks of the years paid it’s tole on me. And the new year started of busy like always. So no time to reflect on last year. Any way i wish everybody a happy and good 2009.