When you send an email there may be multiple fields in the email header that specify the email address that it came from and how to reply back to that address. Some of these are:
- From: This is the field that the user sees in their email client as the "From" address. This field is the most easily (and most often) spoofable as you can put anything you want in this field and it doesn't change how the email is received or responded to. Most systems, in my experience, don't try to protect this field either.
- Envelope sender: This is used internally by email software to see who the email was really from. Different systems (i.e. spam blockers) can use this field for different purposes.
- Return path: This field specifies the email address to reply to when you click the "reply" button on your email client.
There can be multiple problems if the latter 2 field are not properly set. Some of these are:
- Spam blockers may be more likely to identify the email as spam
- The email might be sent from the wrong IP address. Exim (which cPanel uses by default) might be configured to check /etc/mailips to determine what IP address to send from depending on the domain of the envelope sender.
- The recipient might reply to the wrong email address when replying to the email.
When sending an email from PHP via the mail function through Exim you can only manually set the "From" header field (of the three) through the "additional_headers" (4th) parameter. This might be possible to remedy on some systems however.
If your server is configured to allow it (it may require privileged user permission), you can pass to the "additional_parameters" (5th) parameter of the mail function the -f Exim option, which sets the envelope sender and return path. For example:
mail('example@gmail.com', 'This is an example', 'Example!', 'From: example@yourdomain.com', '-f example@yourdomain.com');On a related security note, if you think an email may not be legitimate, don't forget to check the email headers by viewing the original email source. Our servers include many useful headers in emails to help combat fraud including (depending on circumstances) the account the email was sent from, the IP address it was sent from, if it was sent from PHP, and if so, the script it was sent from.
