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"FREEOLA - formmail script changes!"

On your status page you have just added:

"Resolving PHP/CGI email issues on the server.: We are in the process of correcting a minor misconfiguration on the web servers which allowed mail to be sent without correctly specifying who the mail was sent from. If you are currently making use of a Formmail script or PHP email, please make sure that any emails your script tries to send are configured to be sent as coming from a Freeola Hosted email address."

Can Freeola say if this means you now MUST use the 'from' field in your forms?

The Freeola help pages say:

"From:You can also set the from field; this will be reflected in the "From:" field in your mail client, i.e. the sender of the email. So if you have more than one form you can easily see which is which.
"

I don't use this field - but if it is now to become mandatory then can you say how much notice you are giving before the changes take affect?

The formmail issues have been going on for quite a while so I hope if this field is now mandatory you don't suddenly introduce it without proper notice!

Thanks in advance from a slightly worried user!

loki:
"This means that the Form To Mail script will not work with the reply-to function, sorry".

Would it not be possible to add it to the form to mail script at all?

I managed to add it to a custom script in a matter of seconds, and was under the impressions the form to mail script was just a standard PHP script downloaded from a web site (can't remember which site, sorry)?

It would be a really handy addition to the script!

Thanks for the notice. Unfortunately, wherever websites use forms, people will try and spam them.

I will ask one of our programming team to look at the possibility of adding an optional verification image (or other techniques) the the Form To Mail script to help lessen the impact of automated form spam in future.

Things are starting to look much better to me!
after spending days and days on this
I've nearly got everything back to normal.

FYI Freeola, in case it's useful to you:

I received this FORM spam at 17.56 today:
Message: Thanks 123 adware
Name: Mike Stranger
Email: [email protected]

Searching on some of these terms shows this 'plank' if quite an active spammer and seems to insert spam links in to forms and forums.

Bummer!

ByteMe wrote:
>
> My test forms are all working fine and coming through within the
> hour. Do you think I am safe to make them "live" again?

We believe that the Script and Server are now configured correctly and, with the addition of the From address requirement, we can now act quickly to block spamming accounts.

Therefore, I think you should be safe to go live and I expect to see no more problems or slowdown on the scale recently experienced.

I believe that the server configuration strips out the header information - this is why we require the addition of the -f parameter as well as the From address in third party scripts.

This means that the Form To Mail script will not work with the reply-to function, sorry.

I take it at the moment that this line of code will NOT work on the freeola form to mail script?

Kev


> Any chance of the Freeola 'form to mail' script being updated to
> allow <input type="hidden"
> name="reply-to"
> value="[B]user-email[/B]"> , where
> [B]user-email[/B] is the name of the form field
> that asks for the users email address, allowing for the same use
> of the reply button?

Can I second that request from cjh below. It would be a useful addition to the Freeola script.

My test forms are all working fine and coming through within the hour. Do you think I am safe to make them "live" again?

I seem to be back in the game :)

Test emails are coming through pretty quickly on a custom PHP mail script, and using the Reply-To code for the users email address works fine (allows the use of the reply button in Outlook Express, Hotmail, etc as before), so hopefully it'll stay that way.

Any chance of the Freeola 'form to mail' script being updated to allow <input type="hidden" name="reply-to" value="[B]user-email[/B]"> , where [B]user-email[/B] is the name of the form field that asks for the users email address, allowing for the same use of the reply button?

I had tried that without any success.
As I had it working without '\' I guess it's something else that's the problem.

Thanks anyway.