tosbourn

Allowing your own From header with sSMTP

How to go about setting your own From header using sSMTP

Written by

  • Aug 2010
  • Updated: Feb 2025
  • 213 words
  • Web Dev

2025 Update: According to the Debian wiki the sSMTP project has been unused since 2019 and the recommendation is to use msmtp instead.

Today I was wrestling with some email issues on a server and decided to install sSMTP as opposed to Sendmail for sending email out to their internal SMTP server.

First thing I should say is that installing it was a real dream compared to the messing around I had previously done with Sendmail and whilst I know it is no longer maintained it seems very solid and does exactly what I need it to.

One thing that perplexed me however was that whilst I was able to change most of the normal headers by simply passing them in using the PHP mail() function I was unable to set the ‘From: ‘ header.

Since sSMTP uses the www-data user when it is running this is who was coming up as the sender, which is very ugly and not very helpful to the user

Luckily there is a one line fix for this problem, in the ssmtp.conf file (found in my system at /usr/local/etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf) add the following line.

FromLineOverride=YES

This will then allow PHP to set whatever From header it wants.

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