My old contact form has stopped working

[higgsyd]

Today I went back to an old site of mine that I had not touched for some time and I find the contact form is failing after submitting it:

  Application Error
     An error has occurred in the program
    close sendmail pipe failed, mailprog=[/usr/sbin/sendmail david@higgsy.com] at eval (11) line 108.

I think the way it works is the form Action is to reach out across the internet and run the FormMail.pl residing in the root of my domain.  The error message above suggest to me there has been a fault whithin the formmail script when it tries to run sendmail

Am I on the right track here?  My website is at

http://dave.higgsy.com/ and go to Contact

any suggestions as to what area I should investigate would be gratefully recieved, many thanks in advance

[Nancy OShea]

I don't know anyone who still uses Perl programming (aka cgi-bin) for forms. If your server supports Perl, it very likely supports modern PHP  code too which is what we use to collect & process form data in the 21st century.   But writing secure scripts requires some coding skills.  This PHP mail sending library is the one most web hosts recommend.

https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

Alternatively, use a new contact form from a 3rd party service like Wufoo.com or JotForm.

[osgood_ · Accepted solution]

If the form has suddenly stopped working after working when initially deployed/tested and you have made no recent updates to the code then that points to the server being updated without your knowledge and the script is no longer compatible. This should not happen without your prior knowledge but chances are its a shared server and updates happen 'behind your back'. Having said that FormMail.pl is a very old dated perl script for handling form submissions, it might be time to bite the bullet and update the way the information from the form is handled.

[Nancy OShea]

Contact the hosting provider to find out which scripts they support.  Some of the cheaper hosting plans don't support scripts to save on overhead.

[higgsyd]

many thanks to Nancy and Mr Osgood.  I have begun to look at phpmailer so maybe stand by for questions!

[osgood_]

You might want to investigate if your remote server supports the simple php mail function as that is a lot simpler to deploy than phpMailer.

Some hosts stopped supporting the default php mail function by default because a lot of amatuer developers didnt know how to use it responsibly and it was attracting spammers who could send mail through the hosting providers mail service, which potentially would get them blacklisted.

If you validate the form information correctly this can't happen but amatuers most would not use any validation, so the form was open to abuse. phpMailer usually requires authentication so its more secure in terms of spamming and less open to being incorrectly deployed by amatuers

[Gail5ECD]

It is worth keeping an eye on php versions as some can be dropped by hosting companies as they are updated leaving the mail script unusable.

[higgsyd]

thanks GailSECD

they notify me when they are retireing old versions and also try to get me to pay if i need to still use an old version going forward so I'm all up to date on that front -