Tag Archives: email

501 5.5.4 Invalid Address when including Sender Name on Windows Server + PHP mail + IIS SMTP or MS Exchange

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An interesting issue I came across the other day was that PHP was complaining giving a 501 5.5.4 Invalid Address error when trying to send email. The server uses IIS SMTP and the sender specified using the From: header ie
From: Me
Just specifying the email by itself works fine:
From: [email protected]

It turns out that this is a conflict between IIS SMTP and PHP. You need to specify a from email address separately by setting the ini configuration sendmail_from (for the MAIL FROM: command I presume) ie.

[php]
function mail2($from_address, $from_name, $to_address, $subject, $message, $headers) {
$old_sender = ini_get(‘sendmail_from’);
ini_set(‘sendmail_from’, $from_address);
$headers = "From: " . $from_name . " <" . $from_address . ">\r\n" . trim($headers);
mail($to_address, $subject, $message, $headers);
ini_set(‘sendmail_from’, $old_sender);
}
[/php]

Presumably this is not an issue on UNIX as the external sendmail program handles delivery.

Don’t ever put CNAME on the root domain (esp. if you want MX to work)

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I was changing name servers for one of my domains. When testing the mail setup, I kept getting mail sent to the web server rather than the mail server. It turns out that if the mail server can’t find mx records, it falls back to A (or CNAME) records. So why was the mail server falling back to using the A/CNAME record when I had a perfectly good MX record assigned to the domain? After many hours of debugging and comparing working domain with non-working ones, the only difference I found was that I has a CNAME for the domain eg.

domain.com. 3600 IN CNAME www.domain.com

Turns out that if you have a CNAME for the domain, it redirects the lookup not just for A but for every record. So from dig, it looks fine if you query the authorative name servers directly – you see the mx and cname record – but it falls flat when queried on the recursive nameserver. Indeed after looking at RFC 1034, it states that “If a CNAME RR is present at a node, no other data should be present”. So setting the CNAME on the domain also consequently redirected requests for NS and SOA records, which made the domain quite invalid, although the subdomain records still resolved. Bottom line, don’t ever put CNAME on the root domain.

I was trying to be smart and save on retyping the IP by using CNAME… but turns out I was too smart.