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MIVA^®  RESOURCES: MvSMTP BCC Patch

by Ivo Truxa, 03/05/2000

Due to a buggy SMTP header sent by Miva's MvSMTP command it is often impossible to attach additional header lines as claimed in the Miva Reference Manual. The problem was reported since ever on the Miva-User List and described well for example by Doug Barton from Simplenet. You may check Miva archives for details.

On many systems it is impossible to attach blind carbon copies (BCC) of a SMTP message. BCC is very useful if you need to send copies to more persons without that they see addresses of the other recipients. In such a case Miva programmers use to send e-mails to each recipient separately. It can be really long, especially if you have a mail list of several hundreds or thousands of addresses. During the standard 90 secs of Miva timeout you manage to send just few messages, regardless how long they are, and therefore you need to run the script repeatedly either as a cron job, reloading it with JavaScript, Meta-Refresh or other similar techniques.

I believe that there could be some configurations where the method described by Miva works, but I have personally tried it without success on several versions of Sendmail and Qmail. All tested systems worked fine with BCC sent manually, but ignored totally BCC from MvSMTP.

However, I needed urgently to use BCC with Miva. It looks that Miva Co. has other problems than to read their wish-list. I had to fill my wish myself (as we all have to do with Miva).

The trick is easy, but it works only if you have access to the Miva binary (it is often in your cgi-bin). The patch works both with Miva Empresa and Miva Mia.

Before you proceed please read my legal disclaimer and be aware that I cannot be taken responsible if you have messed up your system or got in problems with your ISP/IHP or even with the Miva Corporation. You should edit executable files only if you know what you are doing and if you are sure that you do not break any laws or TOS (Terms Of Service). Please backup the binary before editing it!

HOWTO:

Open the Miva binary in a hex editor, search for the 'CC: ' string (there is only one in all the binaries I have seen - up to Miva Mia or Empresa 3.64) and replace it with 'BCC:'

Please remember that the string must end with a terminating 0 character (ASCII value 0) - normally it is no problem because the original string CC: is also 4 characters long - it contains a space character attached at the end - we do not need the space character here, so the place can be used too. If your mail server should ever have problems with the missing space, you can always add it in the argument of the MvSMTP tag.

Now you simply use the MvSMTP tag as usually and put all your BCC addresses (comma separated) into its CC field. Miva will send them as blind copies. You cannot use normal CC, but you can still attach multiple addresses in the TO field.

You are done!

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