mail() problems

slightlyeskew

Hey all,

So I'm having mail( ) problems. In short, the function wont work, no matter how I play with it. Is this a php.ini problem? I'm working in linux (ubuntu). I'm looking at this in the php.ini file:

; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
;sendmail_path =

I understand this means that this section is not being implemented, and no email address is being supplied.

I would use smtp to send out mails (and I have to varying degrees of success in the past), but I don't know how to deal with the problem of having my password posted in the file. Can anyone recommend a technique or way to use smtp in a mailing program but feed in the password from a secure area? This is for a "Contact" form on a website that is hosted on a remote server...so I am a bit worried about security. As always, any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

NogDog

The way I've used SMTP in the past is to use the PHPMailer class, which comes with its own SMTP class (see example).

slightlyeskew

Yes but your example has the password to your email account in the php file, which (and correct me if I'm wrong) is going to be available to anyone who wants to view it. Do you have a method or technique for obfuscating the password (and preferably the password and email address)?

bradgrafelman

It's only available to anyone who has direct access to the PHP file. If you don't want people getting your passwords, then don't give them access to your source code.

slightlyeskew

This is what I'm inquiring about...so lets say I have:

<html>

blah blah

email:

name:

message:

</form>

</html>

And this calls my php script which does the actual mailing and which will be displayed to the user. Since its displayed to the user the code will be accessible to the user. What I'm asking for is a technique to keep the php away from the user when sending this email. That would enable me to use smtp to send the message. I would be perfectly content with keeping the code away from the user 🙂 but I'm not sure how to use the php file to send the email without giving the user access. Thanks for your help!

NogDog

No one can read your .php files via HTTP (i.e. via the web) -- only what those scripts output to the browser.* They can only read the actual PHP source code if they can directly access the file via FTP, your web site's control panel, or other similar things which should require a user ID and password to access. However, if you want an additional layer of security, you can put the "secret" stuff in a separate file in a directory above the web root directory, and [man]include[/man]/[man]require[/man] it into the main script, so if by some fluke where the web server config gets hosed, they still can't access it via HTTP.

This forum is PHP-based. Do a view source on this page and just try to find the underlying PHP code. 😉

bradgrafelman

Ah darn, I'm too late to respond. NogDog stole my thunder:

NogDog;10981939 wrote:
* This forum is PHP-based. Do a view source on this page and just try to find the underlying PHP code. 😉

Indeed; this PHP-based forum uses MySQL as a backend. Thus, there is a line in the PHP source code that contains the password (in plain text) that vBulletin uses to connect to the MySQL server.

If you could be so kind, could you post that password for us to see? I'd love to have a shiny red name instead of this boring green one. 😉