Making PHP / WordPress send email using custom sendmail
Recently I have had the pleasure of migrating a WordPress website which resulted in a peculiar problem - sending email functionality on the new server no longer worked. After some digging around I found out that PHP has this mail function which uses the sendmail program to actually send your email.
Well after messing around with real sendmail for a good while and still not really understanding how to configure it properly, I decided to write my own sendmail.py script that uses my gmail and its app password to send out an email to whoever PHP/Wordpress wants to send an email to on my behalf.
After script was done I had to tell php to use it via sendmail_path = path to sendmail.py line inside php.ini which was located /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini on my Debian server. Then I just restarted apache server and voila, sending email worked!
Here is sendmail.py in all of its hacky glory:
#!/usr/bin/python
#this is replacement for sendmail that php can use to send its goddamn emails
import smtplib
import sys
def findToAddress(lines):
for i, val in enumerate(lines):
j = val.index("To: ")
if j != -1:
return val[j+4:]
return ""
fromaddr = 'whatever@example.com'
lines = sys.stdin.readlines()
toaddrs = findToAddress(lines)
msg = ''.join(lines)
username = 'you@gmail.com'
password = 'your app password'
# The actual mail send
server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com:25')
server.starttls()
server.login(username,password)
server.sendmail(fromaddr,toaddrs, msg)
server.quit()