Re: Re: verification of mail success

Manuel Lemos wrote: > Hello, > > on 02/23/2006 09:22 PM mattias@thorslund.us said the following: > >> This might be "too simple" or not... >> >> I'm trying to send emails from my PHP page, and while both mail() and PEAR Mail >> work, I'm having a hard time finding out whether a message was actually sent or >> not. >> >> With both mail() and PEAR Mail, an email to an invalid domain (syntactically >> valid) name returned "success"... Running mailq at the command prompt gives me: >> >> "(Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=activeagenda.org >> type=MX: Host not found, try again)" >> >> Basically, I'd like my PHP script to know of issues like these. >> > > What you want is impossible most of the time. The problem is that > usually applications are MUA (Mail User Agents) and so do not deliver > messages. They rather queue them in the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) queue. > So you only know whether the message was successfully deliver or not if > you request some kind of delivery notification. > > Alternatively, if you want to know whether an address is valid, you may > want to try this e-mail validation class. > > http://www.phpclasses.org/emailvalidation > > You may also want to try this other class that can act partially as an > MTA. It is a normal mail composing and sending class with a SMTP > delivery sub-class that has a direct delivery mode. This means that it > will attempt to send the message directly to the destination SMTP server > rather than queueing in the local MTA queue. > > It comes with a wrapper function named urgent_mail(). It is compatible > with the mail function, except that it uses the class direct delivery > mode to attempt to deliver the message right away. If it fails due to > some temporary error, it falls back to the mail() function. > > http://www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage > First, thanks for quick replies, everyone! Manuel: I'll look into the mimemessage class. Yes I'm aware of the mail queue. I guess what I'm after is way to get a more detailed status message. I notice that in the mail queue, each message is given a unique ID, which I suspect could be used for my purpose, i.e. has the message been processed yet, is there a temporary or permanent delivery problem, etc. I don't see how the PHP function would be able to get the message ID of the message it just handed over to the MTA. I guess one way would be to implement a queue of my own, and use the "direct SMTP" approach to deliver messages. /Mattias