What defines the bounce address?

[frankoamiricano]

I am confused about something, I have many people using a server of mine for hosting stuff. I have a few phpBB installs as well.

Whenever a email that phpBB tries to send is not delivered and bounces, I get it. I have the admin email address set to the owners of the respective forums, yet I get the bounces.

[espicom]

If the PHP mail() function is used, the bounce address is the user that apache runs under (on non-Windows systems) plus the host name, as in "apache@www1.myhostservice.net". On Windows systems, the return address is specified in the php.ini file.

If SMTP is used, the bounce address will be set to the administrative email address set in the ACP.

[frankoamiricano]

Sorry for my ignorance, what is ACP?

Why can phpBB not add in a return-path header so we can define the bounce location without external SMTP?

Can someone tell me appropriate file to look for the code to add in the header?

[espicom]

ACP = Administrative Control Panel.

Just spent a couple hours testing a MOD for it, so I'm still in abreviation mode. Sorry!

[primedomain]

If you cannot use SMTP, you might be able to set your specific sendmail return-to address by uploading a php.ini to the /includes directory (usually the php.ini applies only to the directory you uploaded it to, but this may be different for some hosters. In any case the setting needs to be changed for /includes, because that's the directory with emailer.php):

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sendmail_from = yourmail@blah.com

If this doesn't work, try the following: assuming your current setting for sendmail_path is

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/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

change it to

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sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f forumbounces@server.com

If you cannot upload a php.ini (might not always be possible with shared environment hosting), this topic might help: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.ph ... t=sendmail

[frankoamiricano]

Thanks everyone for the help, I found the sendmail path thing did not work, I also found in my research I am not at all alone in this issue.

I discovered a fix by adding an additional header to the mail() command in emailer.php

What is confusing is that the from: and Return-Path: are both set in the phpBB code, it just does not get put into the email.

I tested it as a test case in a simple hard codes email test, linux and os x both, and I suspect almost all other systems out there just do not honor the Return-Path: header at all. You have to add it as a -femail@example.com header and it will get put in. It makes no sense, but I consider it a bug in phpBB.

This leads me to my next question, where do you report bugs and fixes to in hopes they get back into the next version?

For example, only \n is used as the line endings in the emails, thats wrong as far as I know, it should be \r\n as per RFC, a lot of email servers out there will complain about stuff like this.

My official one line fix in emailer.php is to find the line that looks like this and change it to this...

find:

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$result = @mail($to, $this->subject, preg_replace("#(?<!\r)\n#s", "\n", $this->msg), $this->extra_headers);
			

change:

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$result = @mail($this->address, $this->subject, $this->msg, $this->extra_headers,"-f" . $board_config['board_email'], '-f' . $board_config['board_email']);

[Graham]

For the time being, you don't report bugs - the bug tracker is closed until we release the beta of the next major version.