How to debug mail forms that stopped working recently?

[Randy Anderson]

Server error!

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.

Error message:
malformed header from script. Bad header=/home/dixiehos1/dead.letter...: bubba.pl

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 500

www.bubbasurfs. com
Tue Feb 8 12:40:54 2011
Apache/2.2.15 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.19 mod_ssl/2.2.15 OpenSSL/1.0.0a FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.6 with Suhosin-Patch mod_apreq2-20051231/2.6.0 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.7

[Oralloy]

Randy,

The first question to ask is "what changed"?

....your turn!

[Randy Anderson]

Thanks for your response.

Well I noticed today they were not working. Looking at error logs all errors apprat to have begun today.

This morning I tried applied for a Recaptcha key, as having major spam issues.
But it did not work so deleted the new file and went back to old without the captcha script in form mail.

Now captcha works off a third party server, not my server so how could it have changed anything on my server.

I have the error file if you would take a look at it please.

Randy in Orlando

I entered the url below at captcha:
Domain Name: global-key.dixiehost.c om
This is a global key. It will work across all domains.

Public Key: XXXXXXXXXX-
Use this in the JavaScript code that is served to your users

Private Key: XXXXXXX-O4CM8y6
Use this when communicating between your server and our server. Be sure to keep it a secret.

[Oralloy]

Well, if the captcha response changed, it might have modified something that your email script is processing.

After all, your server has to publish the captcha response to the user interface and then verify the user's response coming back.

Can you up-load one of the letters, that failed to post, please? I think by looking at the headers, we'll be able to better identify what's going on.

Please, though, edit the up-load before posting it, so no critical addresses or information are exposed.

[Randy Anderson]

Do you mean upload one of the form mail scripts? formmail.html or *.pl
The error message in is previous post, the 501 server error. It appears to be posting to a new dead.letter file instead of sendmail.

There are no mail bounces if that's what your referring to.

[Oralloy]

What it looks like is that the offending script is posting the name of the dead.letter file in place of script headers. I'm wondering why that is happening.

That would occur, if your script was building a letter then dropping the send for some reason. The message might be emitted inside one of your perl scripts (from the sendmail program as a warning to the user), which is then captured by the CGI process ...

That said, I'd take a look and see why the letter was dropped, as it's the only concrete evidence you have at the moment.