Msmtp works from centOS command line but not from PHP

[george96]

I hope someone has run into this before. My php function is;

function msmtp($To, $Subject, $Body, $Headers, $Account) {
	$Email = "To: $To\nSubject: $Subject\n$Headers\n\n$Body\n";
	exec("echo '$Email' | /usr/bin/msmtp -t -a $Account $To");
	}

this is the function call:
msmtp($mailTo, $mailSubject, stripslashes($mailBody), $mailHeader, “information”);

$Email has the correct information. When echo’d into the msmtp program it’s like entering a black hole. I can’t find any logs that tell me what’s going on. from the command line, no problem. it works and updates the log in /var/log. /etc/msmtprc has the right mods, 600.

I wish I could find some way to see what’s going on with this. I add a -v option to msmtp but it doesn’t make it to stdout.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Thallius]

Why don’t you use PHPMailer?

[m_hutley]

standard PHP checking; make sure you’re outputting your errors for a local page so you can figure out whats going wrong. In particular, exec will emit an E_WARNING level message if it can’t run the command (like, for example, if the PHP executable user doesnt have permission to access the msmtp file?)

[george96]

Ok, fixed it. This one was really obscure and honestly don’t understand the why of it. I used the below code to get and output in the browser window so I could finallly see what was going on. The -v for verbose mode in msmtp. With this I found the log file couldn’t be written to due to a permissions problem. Fixed that. I then got “errormsg=‘the server sent an invalid reply’ exitcode=EX_PROTOCOL” in the log file, which was coming from the destination mail server.

exec(“echo ‘$Email’ | /usr/local/bin/msmtp -v -a ‘$Account’ ‘$mailTo’ 2>&1”, $output, $return_var);

   var_dump($return_var);
   echo "return_var is: $return_var" . "\n";
   var_dump($output);

I finally discovered that the below setting of the variable $mailHeader didn’t work

$mailHeader = "From: " . $email;

which is the $Headers variable in the below function.

function msmtp($To, $Subject, $Body, $Headers, $Account) {
	$Email = "To: $To\nSubject: $Subject\n$Headers\n\n$Body\n";
	exec("echo '$Email' | /usr/bin/msmtp -t -a $Account $To");
	}
The below however, does work:

$mailHeader  = "From: <?=$email?>";

I do not know what the difference is between these two ways of creating the variable $mailHeader but the last one is the one that works.

Weird.

[george96]

Ok fixed it. Weird problem. I used the below to get an output

exec("echo '$Email' | /usr/local/bin/msmtp -v -a '$Account' '$mailTo' 2>&1", $output, $return_var);
  var_dump($return_var);
  echo "return_var is: $return_var" . "\n";
  var_dump($output);

First I found was the reason the log file wasn’t being updated, didn’t have the right permissions. Fixed that. Next thing, from the log file was:

errormsg='the server sent an invalid reply' exitcode=EX_PROTOCOL

This one took a while to figure out but essentially it was the $Header variable being passed into the function.
The original variable was:

$mailHeader  = "From: " . $emailx;

The one that works is:

$mailHeader  = "From: <?=$emailx?>";

I do not get the difference in the two ways to set this variable, but the second way definitely fixed my problem. All is working now.