Routed email bug prevents activation emails from going out.

[Slamlander]

This report is reflected here. Has anyone even looked into it? Most of my clients have a similar network architecture.

Thanks, Slam.

==(Original Report)==
I am self-hosting from a Swiss Dynamic IP block(see: More Info, below).

I'm having trouble letting the site send email outside my domain. I've traced that down to the forum doing direct SMTP, bypassing my hMailserver SMTP server. The reason that doesn't work is that I am in a Dynamic IP space. All ISP customer dynamic IP space is in most of the SPAM blackhole lists, simply "because" they are in dynamic IP space. This means that those MTAs routinely block all SMTP traffic from those IP addresses. My own MTA knows how to get around this by routing the outbound mail via the DynDNS outbound mail-hop service, a service I have to pay for. Yes, the Internet is broken but we knew that already. SMF doesn't seem to be able to understand that, however.

Unfortunately, The SMF forum software simply assumes that it is installed on a hosting provider that has full and direct access to the Internet, from a static IP address, and does its own direct SMTP mailings. This is a bad assumption and a non-trivial problem. While PHP5 isn't that hard to hack, there is a damned lot of it and I don't understand the codebase as well as I would like.

What this means: Email activation codes can't be sent and I will have to activate each account manualy. Along with not being to email Notifications, this is a real PITA.

To fix this, there must be a way to force SMF to use a specific SMTP gateway, even supporting SMTP AUTH. I request this fix ASAP or at least sufficient info so that I can fix it myself.

PS - The site in question is http://tlda.caselle-vpn.net/Forums [nofollow]

More Info:
It seems that the fora cannot send email outside my private TLD. I have a rather complex three tier system that is required by the way my ISP (BlueWin.CH [nofollow]) operates their network. My hMailServer bridges between my Internal TLD (Caselle-Net) and my external Domain (Caselle-vpn.net [nofollow]). but because that external domain is on dynamic IP, I have to go through DynDNS and their Mailhop Outbound service. This is a bit of a mess. Somewhere in there, SMF messages get lost but not those sent with SquirrelMail. SMF can send email within Caselle-vpn.net [nofollow] but not out to the Internet at large.

My system is on Win2K Advanced Server with Cygwin and IIS5. I do not run Apache.
> goshawk.NE.Caselle-NET:~
> Thu Feb 15 12:15:55 [bash:Roeland:2]$> php -v
> PHP 5.1.4 (cli) (built: May  4 2006 10:35:22)
> Copyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group
> Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies

EDIT:
Confirmed by reading "Subs-Post.php" that indeed SMF tries to send directly using SMTP thus, bashing it's head against the internal firewall. SMF is NOT smart enough to be able to understand basic email routing. This is a serious defect in an otherwise fine product.

Minor detail: 20Feb07
All internal hosts are on NET10.

EDIT: I just installed PHBB3 on a client's machine and it allows explicit declaration of a dedicated mail server. I actually like SMF better than PHPBB3 but without that capability, I shall be forced to implements PHPBB3 for all clients and my own sites. -- Slam 05Sep07 14:04 CET

[nitins60]

Don't worry!! If it's really opening security problems, it will be *fixed* in next version. Always SMF gives first priority for *Security*

[SleePy]

Slamlander,

Thank you for the information, I will need more info before I can see if this a bug or not, but please remember we are all volunteers here and fixes may not come instantly, as we do SMF in our free time.
Are you unable to use the php default of sendmail to send out emails?
If I am getting what you are saying. You are pointing to your domain. Which in turn directs though dyndns that points to your static ip. So when SMF attempts to smtp to your domain the dyndns isn't correctly filtering it?
Is Squirrel mail on the same server? If it is you can use localhost for your smtp host. You don't have to go out to the WAN when you can access it from your LAN on the LAN's hopefully static ip.

I got kinda lost in your explanation but maybe thats because I don't do very many server configurations really.