Bounce.cgi working on Hostgator - read for details

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Hi everyone,

I've just spent several hours getting bounce.cgi working
on our hostgator.com dedicated server.  It's finally working
now
and I thought I'd post details to help others out.

In fact, I have a suggestion Dean - would it be a good idea
to create a sticky post that provides working configurations
/
solutions for bounce.cgi on hosts that are known to have
issues?

That would save a lot of time.

Here are the details:

bounce.cgi on Hostgator dedicated server
===============================

These instructions are for a dedicated server but may
work on shared servers as well if you can provide your
own copy of 'wget'.

The three key items to get a working solution were:

1) Send a test email from ListMailPro to your remote email
address and view the message source to see if a
"Return-Path:" header is included.

If not, edit your config.php file and change:

Code: [Select]

$phpmailf = '';

to

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$phpmailf = '1';

Until I did this the List Mail Pro mail server was not
including a Return-Path: header meaning there was no way for
bounced emails to get back to the bounce.cgi script.


2) Use a Mail Filter, not a Mail Forward in Cpanel to pipe
to the bounce.cgi script.

For some reason a Mail Forward in Cpanel refused to pipe
bounced emails to bounce.cgi no matter what I tried.

However, setting up a Mail Filter worked.

In Cpanel, click on Mail, then Email Filtering.

Add a new filter with:

"To:" equals <insert your bounce address>

Destination is:

Code: [Select]

|/home/userdir/www/cgi-bin/bounce.cgi

Note: there are NO quotes ("like this").

3) Replace wget.  

As has been mentioned, hostgator does not allow users access
to wget which causes bounce.cgi to fail.

If you're on a shared server you're basically stuffed.  The
only solution would be to upload a copy of wget that matches
your server OS into your cgi-bin directory and call it
something else.  Then modify bounce.cgi to use that wget
instead.  

This should work.


Because we own a dedicated server and have root access I
have more flexibility but still found that the server setup
was determined to not allow access to wget to users &
apache.

I added users and user "nobody" to /etc/group in the
get-users group and that didn't work.

I then tried changing the ownership of /usr/bin/wget and it
wouldn't let me even though I was the root user.  I'm not
quite sure how the server is preventing me from doing that,
but it's obviously for good security reasons.

So I simply made a copy of wget and called it something else
that nobody would guess, for example:

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>cp wget wget.2d4f.safe

I then modified bounce.cgi to use the new wget instead
changing:

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$http_program = "/usr/bin/wget -O /dev/null " . $listmail_url . "/bounce.php";


to:

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$http_program = "/usr/bin/wget.2d4f.safe -O /dev/null  . $listmail_url . "/bounce.php";

And it worked (at last!)

On a shared server you could upload a copy of wget to
/home/yourusername/www/cgi-bin, change permissions to 755
and change bounce.cgi to something like:

Code: [Select]

$http_program = "/home/yourusername/www/cgi-bin/wget.2d4f.safe -O /dev/null " . $listmail_url . "/bounce.php";

I hope this is helpful to others.

Also read this thread about the "suhosin extension" which
can cause bounce.cgi to fail as well.   This is what I
thought was going wrong on my server initially, but it was
unrelated.