Matt Wright's formmail - any advice 1

[sincitybrant]

I will set up my problem: I have used Matt Wright's formmail.pl program for a couple of years now without any problem. Recently however I was alerted to the fact that my forms were returning a No/Bad Recipient error. Then someone who uses an FTP account on my site and uses the same script called and said he was getting the same thing. So inexplicably our formmails were down. I checked the permissions and nothing had changed on the script.

Then I went in and looked at where my recipient was set up in the webpage and I switched it to brant@sincitymusic.com . sincitymusic.com being the domain where the script is located. Now previously I had a hotmail address as the recipient (which had worked for months and months). Then I uploaded the webpage and VOOM! it all worked.

HOWEVER, my FTP user's still won't work. It will only work if I use my own email address or another @sincitymusic.com as the recipient. Giving my user a new email address on my domain is NOT a solution. I have added 'hotmail.com' to the @referers in the script, but still no dice. Incidentally I downloaded the latest version just today and installed that, but again, I had it working again with the old version for my site. I hope that makes sense. I would love any suggestions. I add that bit about the latest version because it has a default @recipients set to whatever the @referers is set to.

 

[btaber]

I used to use formmail.pl, which is a great program, but here is the problem. ANYONE can use it, and spammers have been searching the net for this program to exploit it. I haven't looked at it lately, but I think the array @referers is where you put the valid http referal page(the valid pages that allowed to use the script), ie.

http://www.somewhere.com/domail.html

hope that helps

B

 

[tviman]

Because of problems with Matt's script, my web host will not allow his form mail script to be executed from any of their servers. Check with your hosting company and they should be able to recommend a safe alternative. There's always a better way...

 

[justice41]

There are replacements for Matt's scripts here:

http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/scripts.shtml

excerpt from the nms FAQ:

Among the Perl community, the MSA scripts are known to be badly-written, buggy and insecure.

nms was started when a group of Perl programmers got tired of telling people not to use Matt's programs and getting the reply "But what shall I use instead?"

jaa

 

[sincitybrant]

First off, thank you all for responding. I didn't think I was going to get a response after a while. I did go to nms and downloaded their formmail, read the ReadMe and uploaded it. Again though, the form works for me, but still returns the No/Bad Recipient error for my FTP user. I have his email address in the allow-mail-to variable as well as my own. AND if I supply another address at my domain (sincitymusic.com) in the HTML side of his, it still works. We both are using the same CGI script in my cgi-bin . Is there some weird logic or hierarchical issue here?

his form can be found at:

http://www.sincitymusic.com/7fm/topform.html

while mine is here:

http://www.sincitymusic.com/contact.html

Thanks again!