CUNY Academic Commons

Guys, here's a heads up on a small change I implemented today on our Postfix mail server.

In some instances the Commons' website (i.e. WordPress/BuddyPress) will try to send an email that, whether because it has an invalid recipient or because the recipient is temporarily MIA (say a Baruch mailbox while baruch.gc.cuny.edu was down), will either be delayed or fail.

(I'm including an example like this as an attachment to this issue)

In cases like this our outbound mail servers (proofagent.gc.cuny.edu and proofsender.gc.cuny.edu) will try and respond back to the sender notifying them that the message hasn't been delivered yet for reason X and that it will either keep trying again for Y amount of time or that it will stop trying now. So far so good. But sometimes the sender comes through as the website itself (e.g wordpress@commons.gc.cuny.edu or apache@commons.gc.cuny.edu) in those cases the response emails can't be routed correctly because neither wordpress@commons.gc.cuny.edu or apache@commons.gc.cuny.edu accept email.

To improve this I edited our php.ini configuration to add a return-path header of postmaster@gc.cuny.edu to PHP-generated outbound emails. This way these notifications, and other potential email issues, will get send to postmaster@gc.cuny.edu, which actually exists.

This change should not affect the visible "From:" header as return-path is a "hidden" header. But I wanted you to be aware of this just in case.

All best!