28 comment

1. Hello,

   I’ve followed your article in order to setup mini_sendmail on my chroot Apache2 webserver.

   Everythings is ok except this error in the apache’s error.log :

   /usr/sbin/sendmail: can’t determine username

   I’m stuck on this problem, and help would be appreciated !

   Best regards,

   Jeremie Werner

2. Jeremie,

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

3. Incase anyone else is having the same problem…. try femail instead… much easier 🙂

4. Ah, thanks here is url for femail

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

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

6. 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+0x570): In function `build_from’:
   : undefined reference to `strlcpy’
   femail.o(.text+0x61b): In function `build_from’:
   : undefined reference to `strlcpy’
   femail.o(.text+0x665): 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+0x1953): 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

7. 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”;

8. 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?

9. 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”;

10. 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?

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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.

15. 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

16. 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.

    1. You should have a valid domain, that if they reverse lookup it will still resolve.

17. 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>

18. 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…

19. 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.

20. Hi

    I am having problems with sendmail.
    I am running appache on windows.

    My php looks as follow:
    [code]
    <?php
    $from_name = "BESAWEB";
    $from_email= "123690@swu.ac.za";
    $headers = "From: $from_email";
    $body = "Hi, n This is a test mail from $from_name .”;
    $subject = “Test mail from besa”;
    $to = “123690@swu.ac.za”;
    if (mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers))
    {echo “mail send success!”;}
    else {echo “mail fail…”;}
    ?>
    [/code]

    sendmail.ini

    logfile “aptanaxampp-win32-1.7.3xamppsendmailsendmail.log”

    smtp_server=wnameserver.puk.ac.za
    smtp_port=1117
    default_domain=nna.ac.za
    error_logfile=error.log
    auth_username=12332690@nwu.ac.za
    auth_password=Janse

    In php.ini
    [mail function]
    ; For Win32 only.
    ; http://php.net/smtp

    SMTP = wnameserver.puk.ac.za

    ; http://php.net/smtp-port

    smtp_port=1117

    ; For Win32 only.
    ; http://php.net/sendmail-from

    sendmail_from =123690@nwu.ac.za

    ; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: “sendmail -t -i”).
    ; http://php.net/sendmail-path

    sendmail_path = “C:aptanaxampp-win32-1.7.3xamppsendmailsendmail.exe -t”

    ; Force the addition of the specified parameters to be passed as extra parameters
    ; to the sendmail binary. These parameters will always replace the value of
    ; the 5th parameter to mail(), even in safe mode.
    ;mail.force_extra_parameters =

    ; Add X-PHP-Originating-Script: that will include uid of the script followed by the filename
    mail.add_x_header = Off

    ; Log all mail() calls including the full path of the script, line #, to address and headers
    mail.log = “aptanaxampp-win32-1.7.3xamppapachelogsphp_mail.log”

    I receive the message mail send success! but no mail is delivered.

    Hope you can help.

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

22. 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.

23. hi;
    i want to knew about chroot what is that exactly and how can i use it?
    please help me about this im beginner in linux
    thanks

24. GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND!
    https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+chroot&aq=f&sugexp=chrome,mod=1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

25. Hi,

    I am trying to use mini_sendmail utility to send mails.
    But I get Unexpected EOF error when i execute the following command,

    cat email.dat | /usr/local/sbin/mini_sendmail -t -p25 -fabs@xyz.com -sxxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -v abs@zzz.xyz.com.

    The email.dat looks like:

    to:abs@xyz.com
    from:abs@zzz.xyz.com
    date:Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:59:00 +0000
    subject: Email
    MIME-version: 1.0
    Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary=”—-_=_NextPart_7693.NPBM”

    This message is in MIME format.

    ——_=_NextPart_7693.NPBM
    Content-Type: text/plain

    Event Time: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:59:00.377 +0000^M
    Nodename = Amrita@1

    ——_=_NextPart_7693.NPBM–

    Can anyone help me out why I am getting this error.

    Amrita

26. I’ve done all the above but mail() still returns false… I have nothing in the logs, how can I debug that? I’m getting crazy

    1. Solved! I had to create /dev/zero, /dev/urandom and /dev/null

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