email to store sometimes has 553 problem (not always)

[tkubaska]

I've thought about this problem a lot, and I'm baffled. I don't think my problem is due to VirtueMart, but I think the only way to fix it is for me to configure or modify VirtueMart is some way. The problem only occurs for some customers.

The best way I can describe the problem is to decribe when it occurs and to characterize the customers for whom it occurs.

I'm using the Verisign PayFlow Pro payment method. For some customers it works fine; for others I have a problem.

WHEN
When a customer buys a product, VirtueMart sends the customer a confirmation email. It sends this email to the email address that the customer registered with. This works fine.

Virtuemart then also sends an email to the store. It sends this email to the email address that I put in Store->Edit Store, Contact Information, Email. When I look at the mail received by that account, I see that it is from the email address that the customer registered with. This sometimes works and sometimes does not.

When it does not work, the error message is
"553 sorry, your mail was administratively denied. (#5.7.1)"
This error message is sent to the customer's email address.


WHO
It is dependent on what the customer's email address is. I have two test customers. They are both me with different names. They are identical except for their email addresses. For one customer (whose email address is from a DSL provider), everything works. For the other customer (whose email address is from a cable provider), it fails with that 553 error. I have both DSL and cable providers.

If I use an email client (Evolution, Outlook) I can mail from the customer's cable address (which is my own cable email address) to the store's email address (which is a gmail address).

HOW TO FIX
I thought that one way to fix this would be to change the From address on the mail sent to the store. There's no information in the From that's important. All the needed purchase information is in the body of the mail message. I though I could change the From to be an address that I know works.

I have not figured out how to do this. And I'm having difficulty.

FINALLY THE QUESTION
Has anyone else seen this problem? Did you come up with a workaround? Is there something wrong with my hosting account? Is there something wrong with the configuration of my cable account? I've talked to both my hoster and my cable provider and neither is able to help.

Our site is not yet official. Just using my DSL email address is not a solution because I fear we may have customers who have the same problem. So we need to resolve it.

-ted

[tkubaska]

I think I may know what the problem is. I think the fix may be to unimplement VM task 2165.

https://dev.virtuemart.net/cb/issue/2165

Here is a paraphrase of information I got from our local Linux Users group.

It could be that something like SPF or DomainKeys is getting in the way. When VM sends emails "as" the customer, this is essentially the same as when a spammer spoofs someone else's email address. That scenario is exactly what the SPF and DomainKeys countermeasures were invented to combat. That explains why the results vary by domain; if the owner/operator of a given domain does not implement spoofing countermeasures, the spoofed emails get through unchallenged.

This also explains why the email works fine coming from a client because my email client is sending mail through my ISP's mail server while the email from the ecommerce webapp is being sent out via the mail server at the same location where the webapp is running.

So has anyone else had problems with this? Unimplementing task 2165 seems to fix my problem. But I suspect when I update, I'll lose this change and have to unimplement again.

[kschenk]

I am having this same problem.
Is there a workaround to the problem?

[jawatech411]

Ok so how do i go about Unimplementing task 2165?

[tkubaska]

My problem was in line 2165 of ps_checkout.php
I changed:

$vendor_mail = vmMail( $shopper_email, $shopper_name, $vendor_email, $vendor_subject, $vendor_mail_Body, $vendor_mail_AltBody, true, null, null, $EmbeddedImages);

to:

$vendor_mail = vmMail( $from_email, $shopper_name, $vendor_email, $vendor_subject, $vendor_mail_Body, $vendor_mail_AltBody, true, null, null, $EmbeddedImages);

basically it was trying to send the order email to the vendor from the shopper email and it didn't work.  For nonhtml emails this was already the case.

Get to ps_checkout.php as follows:
Go to adminstrator/components/com_virtuemart/classes

[d3vlabs]

the fix posted by tkubaska didnt work for me

[Contendia]

Subscribing.

After reading this post, I noticed that the order emails form my site are also showing to be coming form the customer's email addy.

Why in the world would the app need to appear to send emails from the customer!?!

[d3vlabs]

still no resolution to this and how do u unimplement task?