MediaWiki 1.10 Sendmail Error: Unexpected Response to RCPT TO

The organization I’m employed with had a large demand for a central knowledge base. Since I’m the young “Web Two Point Oh” generation, I took it upon myself to provide Mediawiki. All the young technicians are familiar with it, and it would just make an awesome knowledge base. I proceed with a business card install of my favorite Linux distribution on an old Dell GX270 with 2 gigs of ram, and a 3.2 Intel Processor. After performing the usual upgrades, adding and removing packages, it was time.

Lighttpd was serving up Mediawiki from a chroot jail, and it appeared the application was ready to rock and roll until the “Create Account” feature was tested. No welcome email! What’s this!#?@ The command prompt had an unusual error, or maybe errors. Here’s what I recall from memory:

# UNEXPECTED RESPONSE 553 to RCPT TO:

or…

# UNEXPECTED RESPONSE 503 to RCPT TO:

Either way, mini_sendmail was NOT working properly. After researching for a couple hours, I concluded no one had experienced this same issue, so no quick fix was available, until now. Luckily, if you’re reading this, you’ll find out what steps you can take to correct this error, and get your chrooted Mediawiki sending mail.

Open UserMailer.php in your favorite text editor (pino/nano/vi/etc) and find the following block of code:

class MailAddress { 
        /** 
         * @param mixed $address String with an email address, or a User object 
         * @param string $name Human-readable name if a string address is given 
         */ 
        function __construct( $address, $name=null ) { 
        $this->name = "" ; 
                if( is_object( $address ) && is_a( $address, 'User' ) ) { 
                        $this->address = $address->getEmail(); 
                        $this->name = $address->getName(); 
                } else { 
                        $this->address = strval( $address ); 
                        $this->name = strval( $name ); 
                } 
        }

Make it look like:

class MailAddress { 
        /** 
         * @param mixed $address String with an email address, or a User object 
         * @param string $name Human-readable name if a string address is given 
         */ 
        function __construct( $address, $name=null ) { 
        $this->name = "" ; 
                if( is_object( $address ) && $address instanceof User ) { 
                        $this->address = $address->getEmail(); 
                } else { 
                        $this->address = strval( $address ); 
                } 
        }

Save your changes and try creating a new account. Assuming sendmail itself works from the command mail, no further issues should arise. To make sure sendmail works, try the following:

[user@localhost]$ mail your_email@address.com 
Subject: your subject #hit enter key 
type your message content here, and end with a 
period on a line by itself. 
. 
Cc: if_you_want@whatever.com 
[user@localhost]$

Now if you’re like me, you have twenty or thrity test accounts in your Mediawiki DB that haven’t made any valid contributions, so they shouldn’t exist. Mediawiki doesn’t provide any instructions on how to delete these accounts, but I’ll show you a quick, easy, and dirty way.

[user@localhost]$ mysql -u root -p 
Password: ************  

blah blah blah... more blah  

mysql>use wikidb    #or whatever your wiki DB name is 
Database changed 
mysql>select user_id,user_name from user; 
+---------+-----------------+ 
| user_id | user_name       | 
+---------+-----------------+ 
|       1 | Admin           | 
|       2 | EmailTest001    | 
|       3 | EmailTest002    | 
|       4 | EmailTest003    | 
|       5 | EmailTest004    | 
|       6 | EmailTest005    | 
|       7 | EmailTest006    | 
|       8 | EmailTest007    | 
|       9 | EmailTest008    | 
|      10 | EmailTest009    | 
+---------+-----------------+ 
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)  

mysql>delete from user where user_id > 1; 
Query OK, 9 rows affected (0.01 sec)  

mysql>select user_id,user_name from user; 
+---------+-----------------+ 
| user_id | user_name       | 
+---------+-----------------+ 
|       1 | Admin           | 
+---------+-----------------+

Enjoy.