procmailrc and php

Question

This doesn't work. It's supposed to email me.(as a test; what we really want the php file to do is insert into a mySQL database table)

The input is a payment notification message from PayPal.

(A similar recipe does find the Description line and mails it to two of us)

the procmailrc:

VERBOSE=off
MAILDIR=/usr/home/our/mail
LOGFILE=/usr/home/our/paypal.log
EXITCODE = 99

:0b
|base64 -d|grep -i Description|php tp129.php

---

the php file:

$rawmessage = "";
$fd = fopen("php://stdin", "r");
while(!feof($fd)) {
$rawmessage .= fread($fd, 1024);
}
fclose($fd);

$msg129 = 'raw is ' .$rawmessage;

mail('[email protected]','msg129',$msg129 );

Answer 1

I see a few things you might want to fix:

1. Check your $HOME/.forward file. I think it has to have 644 permissions, and contain a single line: "| /usr/bin/procmail" to get procmail to do things with your email. Check the actual path to procmail - it may be /bin/procmail or something else on your system. Supposedly you have to have the fully qualified path to procmail in .forward.
2. Put <?php on the first line of the file tp129.php Also, your pipeline may need to have the full path to the php interpreter, /usr/bin/php or whatever.
3. Double check the params in .procmailrc. The file names in MAILDIR=/usr/home/our/mail and LOGFILE=/usr/home/our/paypal.log seem fishy. That is, /usr/home/ is a strange directory. User ID's "home" directories are usually in /home or /u, very rarely if ever under /usr any more.
4. Run the PHP code by itself: php tp129.php, and then type some text in, any text, then ctrl-D. Does that send email to the desired address(es)? If not, fix whatever causes that.

Answer 2

The PHP mail() function requires a valid email message, with full headers. It looks like your code only produces a mail body (unless the decoded base64 content contains the headers; but even then, adding an arbitrary string in front of them would wreck that message).

Your explicit assignment of EXITCODE would terminate Procmail with an error message if it weren't for the fact that it contains a syntax error. In shell script, and thus also in Procmail, you are not allowed whitespace around an equals sign in an assignment. It's unclear what you hope to achieve with the EXITCODE anyway; my suggestion is simply to leave it out.

Given that your final goal is to import the message to MySQL, I would propose a simpler test: Open a second file for appending, and write the output there. This should show you whether the PHP code is working as you expect. (Maybe add a time stamp so you see when the results were written, so you don't end up examining old results. Perhaps you'll actually want to overwrite instead of append as long as you're testing; but the date stamp still makes sense.) If PHP is your tool of choice, feel free to stick with that, although I suspect this would be much simpler as a tiny shell script, which you could probably inline to your .procmailrc. Depending on your database schema, something like

:0b
| base64 -d | \
  sed -n '/Description/s/.*/insert into table (field1,field2,field3) values (&);/p' \
  | mysql -uyou -pxyzzy -s db

In the meantime, here's how I would solve your immediate problem.

The entire PHP program can be replaced with a single piece of sed script: sed '1s/^/raw is /' though to avoid a useless use of grep I would also factor in the search for Description.

:0bfw   # Can be simplified if your sed supports a case-insensitive flag
| base64 -d | \
  sed -n '/[Dd][Ee][Ss][Cc][Rr][Ii][Pp][Tt][Ii][Oo][Nn]/s/^/raw is /p'
:0
! [email protected]

The forwarding action will retain the original headers. If that's not what you want, maybe extract the ones you do want to keep, e.g. with formail; or create entirely new headers with printf. You could replace the simple second recipe with the action ! [email protected] with something a bit more complex, like perhaps the following:

:0fhw
| ( formail -XSubject:; \
    printf "From: %s\nTo: %s\n" "[email protected]" "[email protected]" )
:0
! -t

(sendmail -t means take whatever the headers of the message say, and send the message there.)

For debugging, your recipe file should not contain an explicit VERBOSE=off. This is the default, which makes no sense to override; but hard-coding it makes it impossible to debug your recipes with VERBOSE=yes on the Procmail command line.