[RESOLVED] Sendmail issues when sending from my PHP server to a win32 exchange server

[dmacman1962]

Hi All,

I apologize if I am using the wrong forum for this, I do not know if should be in the coding or setup forum.

I am working with my ISP on this and they are not PHP savy, so I thought I would see if anyone here my be able to help me.

I have a Virtual Hosted server that is Windows 2003 server with PHP, Apache and MySQL running on it (This is our site [xxx.com], that we moved from our own hosted server to this virtual server).

We also have a co-located server (at the same ISP's site) that has Exchange on it, and our service company setup and tested our companies mail on this co-located server to handle the email for our site [the xxx.com mail].

I configured the Exchange server to allow relaying, from the virtual hosts IP address only and set the users permission to only allow authenticated users to relay (I set the postmasters account in this case).

On the Virtual server, with PHP running, I set the php.ini like so:

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
;SMTP = localhost
;xxx.xxx.xxx.xx = the IP address for Exchange server on the co-located box
SMTP = xxx.xxx.xxx.xx
smtp_port = 25

; For Win32 only.
;sendmail_from = ; For Win32 only.
sendmail_from = [e-mail]

When I try to use my sendmail code that I used on our PHP server when we hosted it ourselves (which had Apache, PHP, MySQL and Exchange all running on the same server), it fails:

unable to connect to xxx.xxx.xxx.xx:25 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond ....

Am I missing something, or is it an issue on the ISP's firewall rules, etc (which I had then setup the rules for these 2 machines to communicate on all the normail posts (80, 25, 3336, etc)?

I appreciate the help,

Don

[ixalmida]

It may be getting rejected by the client's firewall due to the headers you are sending it from the new server. When I moved to a new server (that I hosted, thankfully), I had a similar problem due to my "Return-Path" header. Even though the "From" header was the same as before, the "Return-Path" was pulling the value from Apache ([e-mail] or something like that). I could not seem to change it from PHP.

The answer for me was to go into the Apache config and change the default sendmail account.

[dmacman1962]

I resolved this.

It wasnt a php.ini or code issue. The Exchange server was set to not accept the validated user to send mail. And the exchange server has 5 IP addresses for various accounts, and I was given the main IP address and not the one I needed to use for this email.

So, changing the IP (of course) fixed the communication error with the server, and allowing the authenticated user to send, fixed the email sending.

Thanks,
Don