How to over ride Return-Path email header set by ISP?

[hennety]

Hi there,
I've been scouring the forums for an answer to this question, but have had no luck so far.

Basically, a web site of ours sends out a newsletter once a week, and what we are trying to do is set the Return-Path header in the emails that are sent out, to find out how many are bouncing.

However, I've noticed that our ISP appears to strip out any Return-Path headers and replace it with their own one, which isn't too helpful for us as I'm wanting to have them sent to an alternative address which will (eventually) trigger a php script to collect these addresses.

Would anyone have any ideas about getting round this problem (I've had a word with the ISP but they're a bit reluctant to make changes). The ISP is using sendmail if that helps also.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Greg

[feldon23]

You can't send the messages from a special e-mail address designed to accept bounced messages?

I use notify@feldon... and check that account periodically with Eudora and then harvest the Eudora mailbox file with a PHP script.

[hennety]

Thanks feldon23.

I've since found out that it's not so much the ISP changing things as sendmail not liking the format of the address I'm using.

Most posts on php.net seem to refer to passing the -f flag to sendmail when calling the mail function, but since php 4.2.3 came out, safe_mode was enabled by default which means that (especially under the ISP's configuration file for php, apache, sendmail etc) you're not able to pass any additional parameters when calling mail().

Sooo, I'm still kind of stuck and not able to get it to set the Return-path header. I've followed the examples I've seen, but still no joy.

I'll keep hunting round for answers.

Thanks again.

Greg

[feldon23]

Safe mode truly sucks. 🙁

Might have to resort to a Perl e-mail script or some other hideous solution.