sendmail close error

vit has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,
Below is the code which is working fine on a number of my web applications on the same server.
But on a new application it logs "Error closing mail" and does not send an email. I do not see any difference with my other working applications and do not see how to find a bug. I checked I am passing all parameters correctly.
So any thoughts what I should check?

sub EmailBySendmail
{
my $to_ptr      = shift;
my $from        = shift;
my $subject     = shift;
my $message     = shift;


foreach my $to_ad (@$to_ptr)
{
        unless(open (MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t"))
        {
                print "error.\n";
                warn "Error starting sendmail: $!";
        }
        else
        {
                print MAIL "From: $from\n";
                print MAIL "To: $to_ad\n";
                print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";
                print MAIL "$message";
                close(MAIL) || warn "Error closing mail: $!";
                print "Mail sent.\n";
        }
}
return;
}
[download]

Comment on sendmail close error Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: sendmail close error by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on Jul 20, 2011 at 21:50 UTC
You're probably better off not reinventing this particular wheel. Net::SMTP and Net::SMTP::TLS have always served me well. Others will recommend Mail::Sender or MIME::Lite. There's plenty to recommend any of those. In fact, if you're wanting a form mailer, do a search for 'nms formmail'. If you're still wanting to know what else to check in this particular case, a good place to start would be your mail server logs. If you don't have access to them your hosting provider will.	[reply]
Re: sendmail close error by onelesd (Pilgrim) on Jul 20, 2011 at 18:28 UTC
Have you checked sendmail and perl versions, and are you using: `use strict; use warnings;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: sendmail close error by Marshall (Canon) on Jul 20, 2011 at 18:30 UTC
What happens if you open MAIL for writing? `# now: open (MAIL, "\|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t") open (MAIL, '>', "\|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t")` [download] Udate: didn't notice the \| at small font size at my end. The 2 arg version will work as written. the 3 arg version would be: `open (MAIL, '\|-', "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t")` Weird, the open() works, but the close() fails. Does the print() work? Nobody ever checks this, but it does return a status like open or close.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: sendmail close error by vit (Friar) on Jul 20, 2011 at 19:53 UTC
I am not sure I understand what you suggest but `print "Mail sent.\n";` [download] is working	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: sendmail close error by Marshall (Canon) on Jul 20, 2011 at 21:56 UTC
What we have is the sequence 1. open MAIL pass 2. print MAIL ???? 3. close MAIL fail step (1) succeeds, step (3) fails. The natural question is did step (2) fail or succeed? I've never seen close on a pipe fail, but it does in this case. I've never seen a print to an open pipe fail either. But, since we are into rare, weird stuff, just curious about the print to the MAIL pipe. print() returns status just like open() or close(). I admit to being stumped. This might tell us something surprising or not - but its easy to do. `print MAIL ...... or warn "print to MAIL failed".` Other way to code: `#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $status = print "this is a test\n"; print "first print returned $status\n"; __END__ output: this is a test first print returned 1` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: sendmail close error by vit (Friar) on Jul 21, 2011 at 18:46 UTC
Re^5: sendmail close error by Marshall (Canon) on Jul 21, 2011 at 21:35 UTC
Re: sendmail close error by stonecolddevin (Parson) on Jul 21, 2011 at 19:48 UTC
Don't pipe directly to sendmail. It's insecure and sloppy. Like mr_mischief said, use a module. Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you're god damn right I'm living in the fucking past	[reply]