HELP! My Form2Email script has suddenly stopped working!!

yiaggi

Hi guys,

I have a real issue .....! I am not bad with PHP but am much better at editing scripts that writing them .... this has got me stumped!

I have been using the same PHP Form2Email script for a few years now. I have used it on many websites and modified it in many ways and it has never given me a problem. It is very simple to handle and edit.

Suddenly - a few days ago - the script on my website stopped working. The form was sending and displaying the "Thank You" message but no emails were being received by the client or by me. I checked the form on 8 different servers / hosting companies and am getting the same result.

I just cannot for the life of me work out why an untouched piece of PHP code which was working fine - can suddenly stop working?! I will list the code below and pray that one of you will be able to see the problem? If anyone can answer why a piece of code can magically stop working that would be great!

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>

<?php
function treat_submission()
{
        $user = $_POST['first'];       

        $email = $_POST['email'];
        $last = $_POST['last'];
        $phone = $_POST['phone'];
        $comments = $_POST['comments'];
        $my_email = "myemail@mydomain.com";    

//      MESSAGE TO ADMIN:
        $headers = "To: ".$my_email. "\r\n";
        $headers .= "From: ".$email. "\r\n";
        $subject = "Form submitted via my website";
        $msg = "".$user." ".$last." has submitted a form via the my website\r\n\r\n";
        $msg.= "Email - ".$email."\r\n\r\n";
        $msg.= "Phone - ".$phone."\r\n\r\n";
        $msg.= "Comments - ".$comments."\r\n\r\n";
        mail($my_email, $subject, $msg, $headers);
// MESSAGE TO VISITOR:
        $headers = "To: ".$email. "\r\n";
        $headers .= "From: ".$my_email. "\r\n";
        $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
    $headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
        $subject = "Thank you for your interest in my website.";
        $msg = "
<html>
<head>
<title>Thank You! </title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is an automated response from me.
<br><br>
Your details have been forwarded to me blah blah blah.
<br><br>
We plan to be back to you quickly, but certainly within 24 hours during normal circumstances.
<br><br>
Kind Regards,
<br><br>
Me

</p>
</body>
</html>
";
mail($email,$subject,$msg,$headers);
        }
?>
</head>
<body>
<?php
        if (isset($_POST['submit']))
                echo (treat_submission($_POST));

    else
            echo ("<p align=\"center\">The form has not been received.</p>");
?>
<div>
<center>
<p><b>Thank you <?php print stripslashes($_REQUEST['first']); ?></b>
    <br>
  </p>
<p>Your request has been submitted to me.</p>
<p>We will respond as soon as possible. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.mywebsite.com">Click here to return to our home page</a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</center>
</div>



</body>
</html>

If any of you can help that would be amazing - this is majorly ruining my day! lol

yiaggi

No one can help???!!!

NogDog

yiaggi;10982194 wrote:
No one can help???!!!

A large proportion of the members here are from N.America. You originally posted at 3:30am here on the east coast (12:30am on the west coast). Your "bump" was at 7:00am in the east, 4:00am in the west. Therefore, you might want to give us some time to wake up and have some coffee before we start trying to help you.

NogDog

Have you checked your spam folder in your email reader? (It's spam filter may be the thing that has changed.)

yiaggi

Hi mate,

Thanks for your message.

I have checked my blocked / safe senders and there is not a problem in there. . . . The "Thank You" message is appearing but the mail is not being received . . . .

NogDog

Try checking the return value from mail() to help see if that's where the problem is:

$result = mail($email,$subject,$msg,$headers);
echo "<pre>DEBUG: mail() result:\n";
var_dump($result);
echo "</pre>";

This is just trying to help ascertain that mail() was called, and whether or not PHP thinks it worked.

yiaggi

NogDog;10982210 wrote:
Try checking the return value from mail() to help see if that's where the problem is:

Thanks mate 🙂

I have run that script with my FormTomail and got:

DEBUG: mail() result:
NULL

Any good to you?

sneakyimp

RTFM on [man]mail[/man] and you should get a better idea of what that function should be returning. This documentation says that function returns TRUE on success and FALSE on failure which makes me think you have made a mistake in copying NogDog's code because your code is returning NULL. Did you bother entering the first line $result = mail(blah blah blah) ?

General rule of thumb with mail function: ALWAYS CHECK THE RESULT. Same with mysql_query or mysqli_query.

If mail returns FALSE, then your system is refusing to accept the email, which might be likely because your script is totally vulnerable to header injection because you don't bother to validate your inputs.

You might want to use PHPMailer or PEAR::Mail or something like that.

dagon

you set $_POST as an argument when you call treat_submission() but don't use the parsed vars, but as it's a global it wont really make any difference just saying is all :-)

NogDog

sneakyimp;10982237 wrote:
...
You might want to use PHPMailer or PEAR::Mail or something like that.

PHPMailer does generally provide more info about mail errors than you can get from mail(), beyond the true/false result, should we determine that's where the problem is. I generally like using it anyway in order to let it take care of all the nitty-gritty details, especially with complex email tasks. 🙂

bradgrafelman

I doubt PHPMailer (or any other 3rd party class/lib) will give you any more information than a standard mail() call simply because PHP never has any more information other than "The local MTA accepted your message and queued it for delivery!" (or the opposite). That's simply caused by the way e-mail works in general.

As far as I can remember, if mail() fails and returns false, PHP's error/warning message will include the 5xx (or whatever) error code that triggered the failure (that is, after all, the only way PHP knows if mail() should return true or false - the SMTP status code returned by the SMTP server).

EDIT: Crap, hit submit too soon.

The point I was trying to make (or was going to, anyway) is that you should verify error_reporting is set to E_ALL and either display_errors (okay for testing in your development environment for most things) or log_errors (the alternative to be used in your development environment - regardless of whether or not anything's broken) is enabled so that you can capture all such error messages and (hopefully) use them to figure out where/what the problem is.

NogDog

bradgrafelman;10982279 wrote:
I doubt PHPMailer (or any other 3rd party class/lib) will give you any more information than a standard mail() call simply because PHP never has any more information other than "The local MTA accepted your message and queued it for delivery!" (or the opposite). That's simply caused by the way e-mail works in general.

As far as I can remember, if mail() fails and returns false, PHP's error/warning message will include the 5xx (or whatever) error code that triggered the failure (that is, after all, the only way PHP knows if mail() should return true or false - the SMTP status code returned by the SMTP server).

Possibly true: it may depend with PHPMailer on whether you've specified it to use mail (PHP's mail function), sendmail, SMTP, or POP3 as to what error info it has available to it.

bradgrafelman

NogDog;10982281 wrote:
Possibly true: it may depend with PHPMailer on whether you've specified it to use mail (PHP's mail function), sendmail, SMTP, or POP3 as to what error info it has available to it.

I don't see how that's the case (especially with POP3, since you can't send mail over that protocol at all :p). It's the nature of how the world of e-mail works that limits your ability to trap errors, not the client/implementation.

NogDog

bradgrafelman;10982284 wrote:
I don't see how that's the case (especially with POP3, since you can't send mail over that protocol at all :p). It's the nature of how the world of e-mail works that limits your ability to trap errors, not the client/implementation.

Eh, details. I was just scanning their web site's list of example pages -- apparently there is some reason you may want to call POP3 before calling SMTP, and PHPMailer has a method for that, beats me as to why -- I'm not an email expert, that's why I like PHPMailer. Anyway, PHPMailer comes with its own SMTP class, which is one of the reasons I've often used it, and I believe in that case it may provide more error info, plus you can configure it to call UNIX/Linux sendmail directly instead of via PHP's mail(), which may give it more access to error info (maybe ERROUT?).

yiaggi

Wow ..... lots to take in! Thank you for your messages guys - I really appreciate your help! I'm not going to pretend that I understand even 10% of it but I'll do my best to get involved! :S I am going to admit right now that I am a bit of a PHP beginner and whilst I am getting better at understanding - I often do not! I have been learning Javascript and Xcode recently and have always meanrt to get onto PHP straight after .....

I will go back to:

RTFM on mail and you should get a better idea of what that function should be returning. This documentation says that function returns TRUE on success and FALSE on failure which makes me think you have made a mistake in copying NogDog's code because your code is returning NULL. Did you bother entering the first line $result = mail(blah blah blah) ?

All I can show you is what I did with the code that NogDog kindly provided and let you guys see what I did wrong ....... it is probably something laughable but I guess you don't learn without trying!

Right ..... Basically I took the code NogDog gave me and entered it into my FormToEmail code like so: (In RED)


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>

<?php
function treat_submission()
{
        $user = $_POST['first'];       

        $email = $_POST['email'];
        $last = $_POST['last'];
        $phone = $_POST['phone'];
        $comments = $_POST['comments'];
        $my_email = "myemail@mydomain.com";    

//      MESSAGE TO ADMIN:
        $headers = "To: ".$my_email. "\r\n";
        $headers .= "From: ".$email. "\r\n";
        $subject = "Form submitted via my website";
        $msg = "".$user." ".$last." has submitted a form via the my website\r\n\r\n";
        $msg.= "Email - ".$email."\r\n\r\n";
        $msg.= "Phone - ".$phone."\r\n\r\n";
        $msg.= "Comments - ".$comments."\r\n\r\n";
        mail($my_email, $subject, $msg, $headers);
// MESSAGE TO VISITOR:
        $headers = "To: ".$email. "\r\n";
        $headers .= "From: ".$my_email. "\r\n";
        $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
    $headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
        $subject = "Thank you for your interest in my website.";
        $msg = "
<html>
<head>
<title>Thank You! </title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is an automated response from me.
<br><br>
Your details have been forwarded to me blah blah blah.
<br><br>
We plan to be back to you quickly, but certainly within 24 hours during normal circumstances.
<br><br>
Kind Regards,
<br><br>
Me

</p>
</body>
</html>
";
mail($email,$subject,$msg,$headers);
        }
?>
</head>
<body>
<?php
        if (isset($_POST['submit']))
                echo (treat_submission($_POST));

    else
            echo ("<p align=\"center\">The form has not been received.</p>");

[COLOR="Red"]$result = mail($email,$subject,$msg,$headers);
echo "<pre>DEBUG: mail() result:\n";
var_dump($result);
echo "</pre>"; 
[/COLOR]

?>
<div>
<center>
<p><b>Thank you <?php print stripslashes($_REQUEST['first']); ?></b>
    <br>
  </p>
<p>Your request has been submitted to me.</p>
<p>We will respond as soon as possible. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.mywebsite.com">Click here to return to our home page</a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</center>
</div>



</body>
</html>

Please do your best not to laugh at me if I have done something truly stupid!

Just a quick other question ... can any one begin to explain how a piece of code like this can suddenly fail on a variety of servers and any email address without being touched?!

Thanks again guys 🙂

yiaggi

Sorry ... just realized the red didnt show up very well - to see where I entered the code - go to the bottom of my code and scroll up about 15 lines - you will see it 🙂

NogDog

Stripped out some of the HTML at start and end to save space, marked my comments in /******/ style comments:

<?php
function treat_submission()
{
   $user = $_POST['first'];
   $email = $_POST['email'];
   $last = $_POST['last'];
   $phone = $_POST['phone'];
   $comments = $_POST['comments'];
   $my_email = "myemail@mydomain.com";
   //      MESSAGE TO ADMIN:
   $headers = "To: " . $my_email . "\r\n";
   $headers.= "From: " . $email . "\r\n";
   $subject = "Form submitted via my website";
   $msg = "" . $user . " " . $last . " has submitted a form via the my website\r\n\r\n";
   $msg.= "Email - " . $email . "\r\n\r\n";
   $msg.= "Phone - " . $phone . "\r\n\r\n";
   $msg.= "Comments - " . $comments . "\r\n\r\n";
   mail($my_email, $subject, $msg, $headers);
   // MESSAGE TO VISITOR:
   $headers = "To: " . $email . "\r\n";
   $headers.= "From: " . $my_email . "\r\n";
   $headers.= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
   $headers.= "Content-type:text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
   $subject = "Thank you for your interest in my website.";
   $msg = "
<html>
<head>
<title>Thank You! </title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is an automated response from me.
<br><br>
Your details have been forwarded to me blah blah blah.
<br><br>
We plan to be back to you quickly, but certainly within 24 hours during normal circumstances.
<br><br>
Kind Regards,
<br><br>
Me

</p>
</body>
</html>
";
   /*******************************************************************
    * This is where you do the email, so we need to check the result  *
    * and then we'll return it so the client code knows what happened *
    *******************************************************************/
   $result = mail($email, $subject, $msg, $headers);
   return $result;
}
?>
</head>
<body>
<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
   /*********************************************************************
    * Now let's get the result returned by the function after it mails  *
    *********************************************************************/
   $result = treat_submission($_POST);
   if($result == false) {
      die("mail() failed!"); // This will be output if mail() failed
   }
}
else {
   echo ("<p align=\"center\">The form has not been received.</p>");
}
?>

yiaggi

Thanks for your post mate 🙂

I ran this code and got:

mail() failed!

I guess that was what we didnt want to see!?

Cheers again 🙂

bradgrafelman

So now we're back to my post:

bradgrafelman;10982279 wrote:
The point I was trying to make (or was going to, anyway) is that you should verify error_reporting is set to E_ALL and either display_errors (okay for testing in your development environment for most things) or log_errors (the alternative to be used in your development environment - regardless of whether or not anything's broken) is enabled so that you can capture all such error messages and (hopefully) use them to figure out where/what the problem is.

since mail() will never return FALSE without PHP emitting some sort of error message.

yiaggi

Unfortunately I don't really know what any of that means though and how it will help me in my case!