loops, mail() & 'Nobody'

[techmeister]

Hi all:

I've been struggling with php's mail() function giving me 'Nobody' as the email sender. I have it working on a simple script of mine, but on another, a loop exists that 'deposits' the results of dynamically displayed checkboxes into the $bullet_body var of my mail() function:

$bullet_body = "Emailed result.";
while(list($key) = each($signup)) {

//Start off SQL query

$query = mysql_query("INSERT INTO $table_ifchk(activity,username,email,signedup4,theDate) VALUES ('$id','$username','$ipemail','$key','$completeDate')");

$bullet_body .= "* ";
$bullet_body .= $key;
$bullet_body .= "\n\n";
}

$mail_to = "[e-mail]";
$subject = "Sign-up confirmation\n";
$body = $bullet_body;
$from = "[e-mail]";
mail("$mail_to","$subject","$body","From: $from");

I have tried every conceivable arrangement, but nothing works! - "Never say die" though, so can anyone help me out here?

Many thanks:
Russ

[Anon]

Nobody is the user that runs your web server, and so all mail sent be sent by this user. There are 2 from headers, the one you can change is From:, but there is another one that you can't change called from: the only way to be able to change this is to be able to add -f to your call to sendmail (on unix systems using sendmail). This switch tells sendmail that you want to send as another user (this is called spoofing and is one of the tactics that spammers use, which is why the -f option is usually disabled).

[Anon]

Im not an expert nor do I play one on tv but I have been using this loop to do some mass emails maybe itll help yaa. Check out the from sections and see if that is helpful.

while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)) 

{
$id = $myrow["lbr_id"];

$lname = $myrow["lbr_lname"];

$fname = $myrow["lbr_fname"];

$eml = $myrow["lbr_eml"];

$suball = "$fname $lname - $subject";  

mail($eml,
$suball,
$message,
"From: $email\r\nReply-to: $email\r\n");

}

[Anon]

this works but if you have lots of users your script will end before it finishes.

you should:

1.
use disable SCRIPT ABORT

2.
set php script timeout to something big, like 5 hours...

and it will work even for LOTS of emails.

[Anon]

Only set the timeout for that particular script, or you could get into infinate loops in other development code and never know it.