Sendmail is not working

[Stuart]

Hi everyone

I am running MS2.2rc2 in a heavily modded version on 3 websites and I have run into a problem with sendmail not connecting to the server.  The issue affect all outgoing mail from the websites automated and from forms. I'm on a shared server.  Here is a quick summary of what happened:

All the sites were working fine on a legacy account we had with dataflame running 5.3.x using sendmail in the basic format without authentication until the server had an issue and was restarted in late November.  After that, the sites were working in all other respects only sendmail was not working so no emails for orders or enquiries were sent.

I contacted support and we were told that the server had gone down and on reboot had downloaded an update of php which must have been a security update to 5.3.29 and that smtp may be the answer.  I installed the smtp mailer which should have been OK for 5.3.x but we couldn’t get it to work.  Therefore it was assumed that the sendmail code was no longer viable on 5.2.29 because the security update meant that authentication was necessary and all attempts to make smtp work had failed.  We  decided to migrate to a server running php 5.2.6, which I know the code works on perfectly as I have versions 5.2 - 5.3.14 zend 2.2 on my MAMP testing server which works fine in all respects.

We migrated all the sites with the same company we were already using - dataflame.com - including 4 sites that used sendmail in scripts - 3 in the same version of osC and, bingo !! , everything worked fine with sendmail.  All the sites except for one were working perfectly too.  The one that didn't was quickly fixed by changing the configure.php and everything worked fine save for a small issue with the admin not seeing new orders even though they were written properly to the database.  I looked on the forums and found others had the same problem after migration and the answer was to simply reload a copy of the database.

OK - so at 1pm yesterday, all sendmail were working perfectly on all sites using php 5.2.6 on the host server.  All sites were working perfectly save for the little issue above with the one site not picking up new orders from the database.  The databases are separate for all sites.  I re-uploaded a copy of the database I had taken before migration and now was seeing all the new orders and everything appeared fine except on testing I didn’t receive the order email normally send out to the client and the admin staff.

To make sure it was actually working I tested another site which had NOT been touched in any way and remained exactly the same as when it was migrated.  The databases are separate and was the same as when it was migrated. — this site also failed to send any emails via sendmail.  Then I checked the sites that use sendmail but don’t have any database and they had stopped working too.

The conclusion the server technicians keep cooing to is that the scripts are not right for the connection to the sendmail - clearly it can’t be the case that reloading a database on one site can affect the sendmail on all sites when there has been no change to the server software and the version of php has not been upgraded and none of the files have been changed.  And clearly the scripts work fine as they wouldn’t work at all for a day and then mysteriously all stop working when there hasn't been a change to the server software.

Therefore - the only conclusion that can be made in my opinion is it is something to do with a disconnect caused by a server side issue.  Perhaps that was the same with the other server on the same host that went down?  I had installed a phpmailer but I couldn't make it work - perhaps that is the script in this case.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated

[Stuart]

Just an update - the server guys did fix it in the end.  They haven't told me how but if you're running php 5.2, don't let then fob you off by telling you its your scripts because it isn't - its their server !!