DavidCraddock.net

I’ve had to solve this problem a couple of times at least, and it’s quite a common task, so I thought I’d document it here.

When you send emails to users of your site through using the PHP mail() function, they will sometimes turn up in the mailbox of customers of your site with the following from address:

From: Root <root@apache.ecommercecompany.com>

This makes absolutely no sense to your customers, and often they will think it is spam and delete it. Often, the decision will be made for them by their web mail host, such as hotmail.com or googlemail.com, and they will never even see the email. You don’t want this to happen.

Writing email templates that appear “trustworthy” and have a low chance of being mislabled as spam by the webmail companies, is quite a difficult task, and there’s quite a bit to know about it. However it is quite easy to change the default “From:” email address that PHP sends your emails on as, and that will definitely help.

Assuming you’re running a linux server using sendmail, all you have to do is this.

First create an email address that you would want the customers to see, through editing the /etc/aliases files and running the command newaliases. I created an email address called customer-emails@ecommercecompany.com.

Then change the following sendmail_path line in your php.ini file to something like this:

/etc/php.ini
...
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -F 'customer-emails' -f 'Customer Emails <customer-emails@ecommercecompany.com>'
...


Broken down, those extra options are:
-F 'customer-emails' # the from email address, which has to be valid
-f 'Customer Emails <customer-emails@ecommercecompany.com>' # the email From header, which should have the name matching the email address, and it should be the same email address as above


Then restart apache, and it should load the php.ini file changes. Test it by sending a couple of emails to your email address, and you should see emails sent out like this:

From: Customer Emails <customer-emails@ecommercecompany.com>

I’ve been using these shell scripts I wrote to convert between unix and windows text file formats. They seem to work well without any problems. If you put them in the /usr/sbin/ directory, they will be accessible on the path of the linux admin account root.

/usr/sbin/unix2win
#!/bin/bash
# Converts a unix text file to a windows text file.
# usage: unix2win <text file to convert>
# requirements: sed version 4.2 or later, check with sed --version
sed -i -e 's/$/\r/' $1


/usr/sbin/win2unix
#!/bin/bash
# Converts a windows text file to a unix text file.
# usage: win2unix <text file to convert>
cat $1 | tr -d '\015' | tee $1 >/dev/null


I use these scripts with the combination of find and xargs to convert lots of log files into windows format with the following command. However this type of command can be dangerous, so don’t use it if you don’t know what you’re doing:

find sync-logs/ -name '*.log' -type f | xargs -n1 unix2win


Back in 2008, I wrote a PHP class that fetched an arbitary URL, parsed it, and coverted it into an PHP object with different attributes for the different elements of the page. I recently updated it and sent it along to a company that wanted a programming example to show I could code in PHP.

I thought someone may well find a use for it – I’ve used the class in several different web scraping applications, and I found it handy. From the readme:

This is a class I wrote back in 2008 to help me pull down and parse HTML pages I updated it on
14/01/10 to print the results in a nicer way to the commandline.

- David Craddock (contact@davidcraddock.net)

/// WHAT IT DOES

It uses CURL to pull down a page from a URL, and sorts it into a 'Page' object
which has different attributes for the different HTML properties of the page
structure. By default it will also print the page object's properties neatly
onto the commandline as part of its unit test.

/// FILES

* README.txt - this file
* page.php - The PHP Class
* LIB_http.php - a lightweight external library that I used. It is just a very light wrapper around CURL's HTTP functions.
* expected-result.txt - output of the unit tests on my development machine
* curl-cookie-jar.txt - this file will be created when you run the page.php's unit test

/// SETUP

You will need CURL installed, PHP's DOMXPATH functions available, and the PHP
command line interface. It was tested on PHP5 on OSX.

/// RUNNING

Use the php commandline executable to run the page.php unit tests. IE:
$ php page.php

You should see a bunch of information being printed out, you can use:
$ php page.php > result.txt

That will output the info to result.txt so you can read it at will.

Here’s an example of one of the unit tests, which fetches this frontpage and parses it:

**++++
*** Page Print of http://www.davidcraddock.net ***
**++++

** Transfer Status
+ URL Retrieved:

http://www.davidcraddock.net

+ CURL Fetch Status:
Array
(
    [url] => http://www.davidcraddock.net
    [content_type] => text/html; charset=UTF-8
    [http_code] => 200
    [header_size] => 237
    [request_size] => 175
    [filetime] => -1
    [ssl_verify_result] => 0
    [redirect_count] => 0
    [total_time] => 1.490972
    [namelookup_time] => 5.3E-5
    [connect_time] => 0.175803
    [pretransfer_time] => 0.175812
    [size_upload] => 0
    [size_download] => 30416
    [speed_download] => 20400
    [speed_upload] => 0
    [download_content_length] => 30416
    [upload_content_length] => 0
    [starttransfer_time] => 0.714943
    [redirect_time] => 0
)

** Header
+ Title: Random Eye Movement
+ Meta Desc:
Not Set
+ Meta Keywords:
Not Set
+ Meta Robots:
Not Set
** Flags
+ Has Frames?:
FALSE
+ Has body content been parsed?:
TRUE

** Non Html Tags
+ Tags scanned for:
Tag Type: script tags processed: 4
Tag Type: embed tags processed: 1
Tag Type: style tags processed: 0

+ Tag contents:
Array
(
    [ script ] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [src] => http://www.davidcraddock.net/wp-content/themes/this-just-in/js/ThemeJS.js
                    [type] =>
                    [isinline] =>
                    [content] =>
                )

            [1] => Array
                (
                    [src] => http://www.davidcraddock.net/wp-content/plugins/lifestream/lifestream.js
                    [type] => text/javascript
                    [isinline] =>
                    [content] =>
                )

            [2] => Array
                (
                    [src] =>
                    [type] =>
                    [isinline] => 1
                    [content] =>
                 var odesk_widgets_width = 340;
                var odesk_widgets_height = 230;

                )

            [3] => Array
                (
                    [src] => http://www.odesk.com/widgets/v1/providers/large/~~8f250a5e32c8d3fa.js
                    [type] =>
                    [isinline] =>
                    [content] =>
                )

            [count] => 4
        )

    [ embed ] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [src] => http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Fpm0m6bVfrM&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0
                    [type] => application/x-shockwave-flash
                    [isinline] =>
                    [content] =>
                )

            [count] => 1
        )

    [ style ] => Array
        (
            [count] => 0
        )

)

**----
*** Page Print of http://www.davidcraddock.net Finished ***
**----

If you want to download a copy, the file is below. If you find it useful for you, a pingback would be appreciated.

As a break from my contract work, I took the W3Schools PHP Certification. I didn’t do any revision, which probably wasn’t wise. It was a bit more difficult than I thought, but I passed still.