I’ve posted my php sendmail wrapper before, but I just noticed that Ilia Alshanetsky has written a php mail logging patch that essentially does the same thing, but from within PHP itself. This is nice because it can log the full path of the file and line where mail() was called, whereas my script can only log as much info as PHP passes to sendmail (which isn’t very much) and what it can get from the environment. The downside is since it’s a patch, it requires recompiling – my script can be dropped into any installation (PHP4/5, and maybe even 3) and just requires a simple php.ini change.

I should also point out that if you’re using this, you should be sure that you don’t “whitelist” localhost in your mail server, or otherwise people can just connect to your SMTP server locally, and send mail without requiring a username or password. If they use SMTP you can’t see what script or virtual host sent the mail either way, but at least if you require authentication you can see what account is being used if it becomes an issue.