[ZendTo] Re: Sender Policy Framework (SPF) check on zendto sent emails

[Mike Brudenell]

Hi, Marlon -

I spotted that here too…

The problem is not with ZendTo per se. ZendTo is simply using PHP's
functionality to handle sending the email message. I suspect your PHP is,
like ours was, simply piping the message into the "sendmail" program, which
then handles transmitting/delivering it.

By default Sendmail sets the sender's address in the "SMTP envelope" of the
message (the thing you're seeing in the message header) to the username of
the currently running program, followed by "@" then the name of the
computer its running on. If you check, you'll see that ZendTo is running
within your web server (Apache?), and that this is running on your computer
as username "www-data". (Therefore the email address <www-data at mydomain.ca>
will probably actually exist, unless your email system explicitly overrides
and forbids it.)

To set the sender address in the SMTP envelope to something else you need
to alter the command that PHP uses to call up sendmail when handing over
the message for transmission.

We did this by editing the file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and changed the
line setting up the sendmail command to read:

sendmail_path = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -fdo-not-reply at york.ac.uk"


It's the "-fsomeadress at yoursite.domain" that forces sendmail to set the
sender address in the SMTP envelope to the address given here instead of
making one up based on the username the process is running as and the name
of the computer.

According to my records we also changed the /etc/php5/cli/php.ini file, but
I can't for the life of me spot what change we put into that one. (I think
this file is the configuration for PHP when run from the command line
rather than from Apache?)

Cheers,
Mike B-)

On 23 November 2012 16:07, Marlon R Deerr <MDeerr at tgf.ca> wrote:

> I sent myself a drop-off to my personal Gmail account.  The header
> information for that email says the following:
>
> Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of *www-data*@mydomain.cadesignates 38.99.162.170 as permitted sender)
>
> Question: Where did it get www-data@  come from?  That email address does
> not exist in domain.  Is this some preference setting I need to correct in
> my setup?
>
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