LessFuss Design

After three days, 14 Wordpress contact form plugins and a lengthy support email dialogue, here’s a post on what you can do – other than repeatedly punching a wall  – if you want to use Wordpress with a simple contact form on a Fasthosts server (or any other provider with strict mail server settings).

Fasthosts mail server security

Fasthosts route all outbound email from web scripts through their SMTP servers, ‘to prevent spam from being sent through our web servers’. If you use a web script that will attempt to fire an email, either the from or to address must be a Fasthosts email account:

Email must be sent to, or from, an email address hosted by Fasthosts. An email address hosted by Fasthosts is not the same as a domain name hosted by Fasthosts. If your domain’s MX record points to another email provider, it will not count as being hosted by Fasthosts.
Fasthosts Knowledgebase

Now I have no problem with this as such – anything that can be done (over and above the validation within the web script itself) to stop my web space and scripts being used to send spam is a good thing.

The problem is that you won’t always want emails from your web scripts to be sent from one single (Fasthosts) address. You may for example have a script that sends the email from the address supplied by the user filling it in, which is perfectly fine. And anyway, the majority of the Wordpress plugins I tried would still not send email, even when I supplied Fasthosts address for both from and to email fields in the configuration settings.

PHP mail() parameters

After the fifth Wordpress contact form plugin failed to send an email, I contacted Fasthosts support, who – after a lengthy email dialogue – helpfully informed me that ‘there’s nothing wrong with the mail server’. So I checked Fasthosts’ support website, the Knowledgebase, to discover that a fifth parameter is required when using the PHP mail() function.

A simple PHP mail function looks like this:

On a Fasthosts server, you need to add a fifth parameter:

According to PHP.net , this parameter essentially forces the mail server to trust the email address supplied and continue sending the email:

The user that the webserver runs as should be added as a trusted user to the sendmail configuration to prevent a ‘X-Warning’ header from being added to the message when the envelope sender (-f) is set using this method.
php.net

Fine and dandy. You can use this parameter to essentially ‘force’ the mail server to accept the address you’ve supplied, Fasthosts email account or not.

Fasthosts and Wordpress contact form plugins

Knowing the fix is only a quarter of the battle – you still have to add it to your script. If it’s your own script then no problem, but if you’re using a plugin then it’s a different matter entirely.

None of the Wordpress plugins I tried came with any option for adding this extra parameter in the configuration settings (suggesting it’s not a huge requirement from users out there), which meant – gulp – diving into the PHP files and finding the mail() function myself.

This is never a great idea for a number of reasons (not least if the plugin is upgraded, you’ll have to make all your modifications again) – especially if, like me, PHP is a teeny bit out of your comfort zone. But it may prove the only way to resolve the problem.

It’s also not always immediately obvious where the mail() function is – some plugins have multiple PHP files, and finding a simple mail() function call that you can quickly edit may not be a simpe thing to do.

What I would say though is don’t use a plugin simply because you’ve found editing the mail() function a doddle. On my journey through the Wordpress plugins directory, I’ve seen some pretty depressing things – plugins that have little or no validation or basic spam prevention, forms that are woefully inaccessible and even some that generate multiple nested tables to control the layout. It’s not worth using trash just because you got it to send a mail…

Summary

If you’re on a Fasthosts server – or with any host that has strict security on it’s outgoing mail – and you’re having trouble getting your scripts to send email, then the solution above may fix it.

If you’ve written your own script then adding this fix will be painless. If you’re beholden to a plugin then it’s less straghtforward, but still achieveable. It just so happens that one of the few plugins I found that sent email first time without any problem, is also by far the most accessible – Mike Cherim’s Wordpress-ready Contact Form plugin – and I would recommend this to anyone on the Wordpress platform looking for a contact form, email server problems or not.

There is of course a third option, and that’s to switch hosting providers. What with this and other things Fasthosts have done to put my back up lately, it’s certainly something I’m considering.