[RESOLVED] fsockopen problem

[louhevly]

Greetings:

I'm using OpenBSD 4.2, PHP 5.23.

Yesterday I got a complaint from a user that she couldn't send email using the php mail program (Hastymail). I traced the problem down to a problem with PHP's fsockopen function. Here's the script I used to test it:

http://visca.com/php/fsockopen.php

<?php
$fp = fsockopen("localhost", 25, $errno, $errstr);
if (!$fp) {
echo "ERROR: $errno - $errstr<br />\n";
} else {
$response = fgets($fp);
echo "Response is \"$response\"";
}
?>

As you'll see if you follow the link, the script hangs for 60 seconds then prints «Response is ""». Port 25 is open and working.

Can anyone suggest where I might go from here to debug this?

Thanks.

Lou

[bradgrafelman]

Works fine for me: Response is "220 server.visca.com ESMTP "

Perhaps it was a temporary problem with the mail server?

[louhevly]

bradgrafelman wrote:

Works fine for me: Response is "220 server.visca.com ESMTP "

Perhaps it was a temporary problem with the mail server?

Thanks for your comments.

I found the mistake, which as might have been foreseen was my own. I gradually learned that the fsockopen failure was only on port 25, then that this delay also occurred when I telnetted to localhost 25, and finally it occurred to me to check the whole smtp chain. I use a Perl script with qmail-qfilter to reject certain kinds of spam and had added a badly conceived loop (which was invoked only for mail coming from php mailers) that was causing this delay.

Just for the record, my version of PHP will use [e-mail] for the Return-Path if the -f flag in sendmail isn't included in the mail() array or in php.ini. (Unfortunately it ignores "Return-Path" in the "headers" field). When Hotmail got mail from these programs to non-existent addresses, as I later found, they would send back a test message to my server to see if [e-mail] was valid. It wasn't. And they started silently black-holing all mail from my server to any hotmail addresses. I've since added www as a valid user, but in trying to find a way to rewrite the Return-Path headers in PHP generated mail so the bounces would go to the clients in question, I somehow screwed up.

Sorry for the noise.

One nice thing about screwing up is that you sure can learn a lot trying to track down what went wrong ;-/.

Lou