How can I disable Exim/DirectAdmin checking if the mailbox exists locally for sending PHP emails?

[Jordz2203]

Hi,
Having a problem with some clients mail services.

So before anyone suggests SMTP, we cant with all our clients, and we would rather solve the root of the problem with this as it wasnt previously a problem on our old server.

The current setup for this particular client is as such

1. They own the domain
2. They are pointing A record, SPF and DKIM at our server
3. Our server is sending PHP based mail as we cant use SMTP for this client right now

The original issue was spam, our spam score on mail-tester is much better now though (thank you @Richard G )

The issue we are having now, however, is that some mail providers have a firewall that looks at the sender and the envelope. The from address is set to [email protected] which is correct, but within the envelope, it is saying the default direct admin account which in this case is the DA username @ the domain (so [email protected])

The mail providers firewall detects that there is no email address which is [email protected] so even though the from in the headers is info@ it still picks up the envelope which is the wrong one. I see our old server didnt do this, it was rewriting the envelope to either be the hostname, OR the from/sender ([email protected])

So these are our current headers
From: Spares Boyz <[email protected]> Received: from za1.ccstudio.co.za (za1.ccstudio.co.za [41.72.146.178]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher REDACTED) (No client certificate requested) by mail-tester.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id REDACTED for <[email protected]>; Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:48:24 +0200 (CEST) Received: from sparesboyzcom by za1.ccstudio.co.za with local (Exim 4.96) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id REDACTED for [email protected]; Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:48:21 +0200

We are trying to instead make our headers one of these 2 options|

From: Spares Boyz <[email protected]> Received: from za1.ccstudio.co.za (za1.ccstudio.co.za [41.72.146.178]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher REDACTED) (No client certificate requested) by mail-tester.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id REDACTED for <[email protected]>; Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:48:24 +0200 (CEST) Received: from sparesboyzcom by za1.ccstudio.co.za with local (Exim 4.96) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id REDACTED for [email protected]; Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:48:21 +0200

or

From: Spares Boyz <[email protected]> Received: from za1.ccstudio.co.za (za1.ccstudio.co.za [41.72.146.178]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher REDACTED) (No client certificate requested) by mail-tester.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id REDACTED for <[email protected]>; Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:48:24 +0200 (CEST) Received: from sparesboyzcom by za1.ccstudio.co.za with local (Exim 4.96) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id REDACTED for [email protected]; Thu, 22 Sep 2022 11:48:21 +0200

I tried this in the exim.conf but it didnt work, I assume Ive done something wrong
*@+local_domains "${local_part}@${domain}" F

 

[kristian]

I think you can set the envelope from by suppling the header in the mail() function call? See additional_headers on https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php.

 

[Jordz2203]

I think you can set the envelope from by suppling the header in the mail() function call? See additional_headers on https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php.

Trying to do this on a server level, most of these cases are plugin based and it "shouldnt" happen so trying to solve it

 

[mxroute]

Just set a catchall account on the domain and be done with it. That'll settle sender verification, which you really don't want to try to cut out unless you have a thing for pain.