New Message: Manila's inflexible E-mail handling

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$717

By: Matt Deatherage (frontier at gcsf.com)

I got a note today from someone who saw me post on the frontier-osx.userland.com site, posted through its contact page, because he couldn't get the "Mail a note to member" page on /my/ weblog to work. For example:

<http://friends.macjournals.com/mattd/profiles/sendMail?usernum=1

When he tried, he kept getting this:

/There was an error sending the mail: Can't send mail because of an unexpected server response. I said "RCPT TO: " and the server replied "530 5.7.1 relay restricted"./

The mail server that Frontier uses is actually on the same machine as Frontier, and is set to accept relaying from its own IP address, so this baffled me for a while. Finally, I tried sending mail to myself /from/ myself, and it worked. That's when I figured it out.

By default, and as far as I can tell, with absolutely no documentation, preferences, or way of changing it, the "sendMail" page automatically includes a "CC:" to the email address of the person posting the comment. So the submitted Email is listed as from you, but to me, and CC: to you as well.

Like almost all 2005-level mail servers, mine is locked down against relaying. Frontier is therefore asking my mail server to send a message from you to you via my mail server, and of course, relaying is denied. This seems to be a Frontier 9.0.1 change in some way, because it used to work on my Frontier 9.1b4 installation from a couple of years ago.

If Manila allowed users to avoid CC'ing themselves, I could avoid the problem, but it doesn't.

If Manila supported SMTP AUTH, a years-old standard so it can authenticate itself to the mail server, I could avoid the problem, but it doesn't.

If Manila allowed configuring the server or the site to not automatically CC anyone who uses the sendMail page, or even to disable the page, I could avoid the problem, but it doesn't.

If the "sendMail" page was documented /at all/, anywhere on a UserLand or Manila site, I might have a shot at figuring out a workaround, but as far as I can tell, it's not.

This is a primary reason that I (or, if I extrapolate, people like me) are reluctant to renew Manila every year. The recent progress is /great/, and that's why I recently renewed after more than two years of letting it sit as it was, but even on something as simple as sending E-mail, there's no configuration and no documentation. For this particular feature, the /only/ configuration option I can find is what mail server to have Frontier use. I can't tell it to use authentication, specifically, and that would avoid all of these problems.

After about an hour of trying to fix this, the best I can come up with is config.manila.callbacks.sendmail, where if I want, I can apparently write a script that zeroes out /all/ CC: addresses in mail that Manila sends. Providing, of course, that the sendMail page actually uses manilaSuite.sendMail instead of tcp.sendMail - and that's not documented. (I may have to make a tcp.sendMail callback script instead.)

I'm sure my frustration level is coming through here, but that's only because this kind of diagnostic and tinkering for a problem as simple as sending mail is ridiculous beyond belief.

(And I'm perfectly willing to be told "it's this simple, and the instructions are on this page," as long as you tell me how I was supposed to find whatever that page was. Several searches of the user's guide and of the UserLand sites for various related keywords revealed nothing useful. I only found config.manila.callbacks.sendmail by diving through manila.root, looking for tcp.sendMail, the script I knew was sending mail.)

Is this really just completely broken for any mail server that's not an open relay? And doesn't that mean UserLand's servers are open relays, since they allow this?

--Matt

This is a Manila site.. http://manila.userland.com/.