MailerEngine outdated?

  • Resolved john01nl

    (@john01nl)


    3 years, 6 months ago

    Goodmorning,

    My name’s John and I’m a technical support employee for a webhosting company in Holland. I’m currently researching an issue with our customers using the PostSMTP plugin.

    Whenever someone uses a contact form that’s been setup with PostSMTP.
    They’re getting the following error: smtp; 554 Transaction failed: i/o error

    After a thorough investigation our system engineers are seeing traces of the use of older Mailer Engines.

    Some of these issues have been resolved by updating the MailerEngine. But those were custom build scripts based on older code.

    We were breaking our heads why PostSMTP, which is a plugin commonly used by WordPress users and which is updated quite often, is also showing these symptoms.

    Then our eye caught a single line on the plugin information page:

    It replaces the default WordPress SMTP library, PHPMailer, with the heavy-duty Zend_Mail

    source: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/post-smtp/#description

    Knowing that Zend_Mail has been abandonment for years already I started my search.
    Looking into some sites we’re seeing the following folder:
    /wp-content/plugins/post-smtp/Postman/Postman-Mail/Zend-1.12.10/

    If this is indeed the version that is used as MailerEngine, then it would be a very old MailerEngine, dated: 2010-05-23
    Source: https://framework.zend.com/changelog/1.12.10

    The latest version of Zend is version: 2.10.0
    Source: https://github.com/zendframework/zend-mail

    I would like to know if under the hood PostSMTP is indeed using Zend 1.12.0 which would explain the error and would fit our system engineers thought that this plugin would use an old engine.

    Can this Zend Engine be updated to the latest version in this plugin? Or can PostSMTP migrate their Zend implementation to Laminas?

    Laminas is the follow-up project for Zend.

    There’s an entire manual that explains how to migrate from Zend to Laminas:
    https://docs.laminas.dev/migration/
    https://github.com/laminas/laminas-migration

    I like to hear from you about this.

    With regards,
    John

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

  • Hi John,

    What is your company name?
    From reading your post I’m really impressed, very professional guys.

    A little background:
    I’m not the original developer and the plugin is a fork of Postman SMTP.
    The developer abandoned the plugin and after a while, a security vulnerability was discovered.

    Our issue:
    What you describe is stuff that I discovered as time passed, and I can add that the original developer even edited the class names inside the Zend framework and gods knows what else.

    I did have thoughts to upgrade as you mentioned and I’m already familiar with Laminas, but in the current state, it’s a big job for me as I’m the only person that maintains it. we are talking about namespacing and big rewrite to the latest version.

    The current version is doing the job properly and I didn’t get any major issues related to SMTP connectivity because of the old mailer engine.

    Your customer’s issue:
    Never encounter 554 i/o error, does it happen to every SMTP or just to your SMTP servers?

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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