Joomla forms (PHPMailer) do not work with mini_sendmail

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on July 17th 2012 - Listed in Internet PHP Linux Mail

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Joomla's contact forms use a third-party software called PHPMailer which can be found in libraries/phpmailer/phpmailer.php.
In most hosting environments this works fine, but on some special installations, namely servers which use mini_sendmail instead of sendmail, all contact forms (and other components which need to send e-mails) won't work.

The following error is shown when trying to send an e-mail with a contact form in Joomla (tested with 2.5.6):

Could not instantiate mail function. (in English)
Mail-Funktion konnte nicht initialisiert werden! (in German)

To debug it, it was necessary to use a standalone PHPMailer script (without Joomla). Fortunately, PHPMailer comes with some handy examples. In my case I re-used test_mail_basic.php.
But as soon as I launched test_mail_basic.php in the browser, this similar error message showed up (which is the same error message also shown in Joomla):

Mailer Error: Could not instantiate mail function.

After a lot of debugging I came across the params which are set in the file class.phpmailer.php:

  protected function MailSend($header, $body) {
    $toArr = array();
    foreach($this->to as $t) {
      $toArr[] = $this->AddrFormat($t);
    }
    $to = implode(', ', $toArr);

    if (empty($this->Sender)) {
      $params = "-oi ";
    } else {
      $params = sprintf("-oi -f %s", $this->Sender);
    }

And this is actually the big problem: The parameters (-oi / -oi -f) are added at the end of the @mail() command but this would only work if the sendmail binary (declared in php.ini under sendmail_path) is actually sendmail, and not anything else. mini_sendmail does not know how to handle these parameters and will therefore fail, causing PHPMailer to throw the "instantiate" error.

The following workaround allows to use PHPMailer with mini_sendmail. Just comment-out the $params definitions in the source code:

  protected function MailSend($header, $body) {
    $toArr = array();
    foreach($this->to as $t) {
      $toArr[] = $this->AddrFormat($t);
    }
    $to = implode(', ', $toArr);

    if (empty($this->Sender)) {
      //$params = "-oi ";
    } else {
      //$params = sprintf("-oi -f %s", $this->Sender);
    }

As soon as these lines were commented-out, the mail was sent and the following output confirmed it: Message sent!

As of the current version 2.5.6, Joomla is using PHPMailer in version 5.2.1. I'll report the bug and hopefully there will be a patch.
Once a patch has been released, I hope that the Joomla developers will then rapidly include the newer PHPMailer version in a new Joomla-release.

Update August 2nd 2012: The 'mini_sendmail bug' has been fixed in the current trunk version of phpmailer. I can confirm it's working. It's now up to the Joomla people to include a newer phpmailer version.

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