Geeklog Forums

I recently found that I'm getting errors whenever my Geeklog install sends emails. I traced it back to the mail server, but it appears that port 25 has been blocked. I decided that it would be easier to use an external mail server - gmail to be exact. I'm now getting the following error message:

Anyone ever run into this? If so, what did you do to correct the problem?

Incidentally, I wrote this wiki article recently: http://wiki.geeklog.net/wiki/index.php/Mail_Setup_for_GMail. See if that helps.

bye, Dirk

Thanks Dirk,

I had tried that, and the error message states that the SMTP server does not support authentication, so I changed the 'auth' parameter to false. With everything else set as you have them in your wiki article, I receive the error I posted above.

It seems that the error has two parts, one is that the sender cannot be set, and the other states that a STARTTLS command needs to be issued first. Any ideas on where to look?

I did actually test it before I wrote the above post. So it works for me.

It's possible that there were some changes in the PEAR classes we're using to send email. Try updating your PEAR libraries. A version that's newer than the one that shipped with 1.4.1 is available from the CVS page. Or run "pear upgrade-all", if you can, to get the latest version.

bye, Dirk

Thanks again Dirk,

I downloaded the pear package and tried again. Still the same results. I guess I'll have to either find another external smtp server, or find a different host for the site.

Any suggestions on either of those?

I looked up how to set up smtp through Google (tried posting link, but SpamX thinks it's spam). Following their format, I get this error message:

I received the same error when following your suggestion above, so I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong.

Looking through the PEAR code, I noticed that it seems to require PHP 5.1.0 to do the STARTTLS. Which PHP version are you on?

bye, Dirk

I'm running 4.3.9, should I go back to the previous version of pear? I'll see if I can upgrade PHP, but I run two GL instalations, and one is a highly modified version of 1.3.7. I'm sure 1.4.1 can handle PHP 5.1.x, but I'm not sure about GL 1.3.7. Would 1.3.7 work with the newer version? What would be the easier route to take? Upgrade PHP, or downgrade PEAR?

You can keep the PEAR packages - they will work just as well on PHP 4. They are actually updates to the ones that shipped with 1.4.1, i.e. they contain bugfixes.

And, erm, you are aware that Geeklog 1.3.7 has security issues? Unless you backported our fixes, it's possible to hack that site ...

The earliest Geeklog version that's known to (mostly) work with PHP 5 is 1.3.9. So I'd say 1.3.7 will probably have problems on PHP 5. Given that 1.3.7 was released 5 years ago, that's justifiable, I think.

bye, Dirk

Yes, I'm aware of the security issues, but after a little over four years online, and having only a couple minor hack attempts, I feel comfortable with it. It does need an overhaul, but I don't have the time that I once had. Maybe not having the email working is a good excuse to take the time to integrate my hacks to 1.4.1, but the email doesn't work in my newer site, and that's more important than the old one.

I dunno, I'll figure something out. Thanks for the help anyway.

The code found in this example should be fairly straightforward, so I won't elaborate on its contents, although it's worth noting that in this particular case PHP's OpenSSL extension must be enabled, because Gmail requires an SSL connection in addition to SMTP authentication. If your server doesn't require SSL, you should be able to authenticate without necessarily reconfiguring PHP to include this extension.

Got mine working with my gmail hosted domain. I used "ssl://smtp.gmail.com" as my server, port 465 and authentication=1.

and I activated the openssl extension in php.ini.

geeklog version 1.6.0