Comments on: Setup sendmail php mail() support for chrooted Lighttpd or Apache web server

By: lelutin

lelutin — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 23:19:18 +0000

Nice that trick about hardcoding the user string!

I’ve just lost 3h debugging this. Since there’s nothing in the apache log it was pretty painful to debug.

Here’s a trick to debug what’s happening inside the chroot on the command line:

echo ‘Subject: test’ | chroot /webroot /usr/sbin/mini_sendmail -v you@yourdomain.com

Also, the article mentions copying /bin/sh to the chroot, but if /bin/sh is not statically linked, you’ll have a non working setup. You need to ldd /bin/sh and copy all the libraries it uses inside the chroot.

By: prasanth

prasanth — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:35:35 +0000

can i know how to configure for windows 7? to send mail using php

By: Will

Will — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:46:32 +0000

To compile femail on debian I had to install the freebsd-buildutils package & the above makefile edit

I also compiled and copied to /webroot/usr/bin/sendmail and testing with

chroot /webroot/ sendmail -v ***@gmail.com < email.txt

it works fine

testing from php only works with /webroot/bin/sh is bash

Chris this is an old subject but any input? I want to remove sh as per your comment.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:40:52 +0000

Also, I find it a bit… beyond silly… that people go through the trouble of setting up a chroot for Apache and then have no problem copying a shell into that chroot. That’s a great way to provide a potential attacker with a much bigger attack surface…. Mini_sendmail is way overkill…

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:39:21 +0000

Jonathan -

There’s no need to rebuild it – the necessary functions are included in the original femail distro. Just open the Makefile and comment out this line:

CFLAGS+= -DHAS_FGETLN -DHAS_STRLCPY

And then run a ‘make’. The author included versions of the functions from OBSD>

By: John Ian R. Medilo

John Ian R. Medilo — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:35:24 +0000

i can already send email thru send mail to gmail account.. the problem is that i cannot received to my company email… when i use the settings

# “Smart” relay host (may be null)
DSmyhost.host.com

gmail account cannot received.

By: alex

alex — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:19:32 +0000

This step is wrong.

# cp /bin/sh /webroot/bin # l2chroot /bin/sh

it should be (I think)
#mkdir -p /webroot/bin/ #cp /bin/sh /webroot/bin/ #l2chroot /bin/sh

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 03:57:21 +0000

I had the same problem as tomcat when compiling femail on Debian. I have patched the femail.c file to include the missing functions it was referencing. You can download the fixed femail for debian based linux < there.

By: Robyn

Robyn — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:15:41 +0000

For my previous post: there’s a fix for mini_sendmail’s recipient handling bug. Patch mini_sendmail.c with the code on this link:

https://dev.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi/browser/packages/net/mini_sendmail/patches/200-fullname.patch?rev=8530

Bye

By: Robyn

Robyn — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:23:19 +0000

Can somebody please tell me. mail() function now works properly, but when testing with PHPMailer, it fails.

PHPMailer has support to add recipients with the AddAddress($email, $name) function. If I don’t fill the $name variable, mail will be sent normally, but if I fill it, I get this error:

/usr/sbin/sendmail: unexpected response 501 to RCPT TO command

Thanks in advance

By: pero

pero — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:30:25 +0000

We have multiple chrooted apaches running with different user rights, so username = “www-data”; is not a solution for the problem!

In this case you have to copy the libc6 libraries into to jail!

After that getlogin() will work, if you have the apache user in /chrootdir/etc/passwd

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:33:17 +0000

Is it possible to add mail() support to an existing php install that wasn’t compiled with access to sendmail without re-compiling? For example adding a module?

By: gnif

gnif — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:27:02 +0000

A few things that arn’t clear here. If you are running inside a chroot, and using suEXEC or suPHP, you must make sure that /bin/sh, and sendmail are executable bu the user.

If you are using virtual users, you must make the modification to mini_senmail by evilghost

/* username = getlogin(); */ username = “www-data”;

By: yudai

yudai — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:56:15 +0000

Whenever I try the test php, I get the following error in ssh:
/bin/sendmail: unexpected response 550 to RCPT TO command
What am I doing wrong here?

By: evilghost

evilghost — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:14:34 +0000

Users having issues with the “can’t determine username” error message can modify the source code and re-run make. I’ve been able to successfully do this without playing with /etc/passwd by manually specifying the user and bypassing the getlogin() function.

/* username = getlogin(); */
username = “www-data”;

By: tomcat

tomcat — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:12:39 +0000

Hi i have also an problem :(
If i execute the testmail php file als root
./php /webroot/home/lighttpd/tmail.php
it works fine but if i test it using lighttpd it doesnt work.
I got no errormessages in log but i think its this problem: /usr/sbin/sendmail: can’t determine username.
I try to add sendmail user to /webroot/etc/passwd file, sendmail:x:65002:108::/home/sendmail:/sbin/nologin
but it dont work
When i change ‘username = getlogin();’ to ‘username = “www-data”; in mini_sendmail.c i got compile error :(
When i write username = ‘www-data’ i can compile but it dosnt work over my Webserver only als root ./php /webroot/home/lighttpd/tmail.php :((
I also try femail but there i get this error:
cc femail.o openbsd_compat.o -o femail
femail.o(.text+0×570): In function `build_from’:
: undefined reference to `strlcpy’
femail.o(.text+0x61b): In function `build_from’:
: undefined reference to `strlcpy’
femail.o(.text+0×665): In function `parse_message’:
: undefined reference to `fgetln’
femail.o(.text+0x12e7): In function `read_reply’:
: undefined reference to `strlcpy’
femail.o(.text+0x17ac): In function `parse_config’:
: undefined reference to `fgetln’
femail.o(.text+0×1953): In function `parse_config’:
: undefined reference to `strlcpy’
femail.o(.text+0x1b03): In function `next_token’:
: undefined reference to `strlcpy’
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [femail] Error 1

Please help me

By: Fabian

Fabian — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 14:56:15 +0000

Or just change ‘username = getlogin();’ to ‘username = “www-data”;’ in mini_sendmail.c :)

By: vivek

vivek — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:35:36 +0000

Ah, thanks here is url for femail

http://quigon.bsws.de/femail/

By: boohoo @ mini_sendmail

boohoo @ mini_sendmail — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 17:18:56 +0000

Incase anyone else is having the same problem…. try femail instead… much easier :)

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:06:37 +0000

Jeremie,

Add sendmail user to your /webroot/etc/passwd file