Miscellaneous Hacks - Contact Us fix for Mandrill.com

[ Works with vBulletin 3 & 4 ]

I've been using Mandrill.com for a little over a year now and I like it a lot; it makes it a lot easier to see which email gets delivered and which get bounced and for what reason. And although I haven't done any specific testing, I suspect mail from my forums is being delivered more reliably.

Setting up vBulletin to send email through Mandrill.com is as easy as signing up for an Mandrill account, creating an API key and set the SMTP details in Options -> Email Options in the Admin CP.

There is one issue though: the way the "Contact Us" form in vBulletin works, without modifications your Mandrill account will be "polluted" with lots of different senders and sending domains. This is because the "Contact Us" form sends mail with the user's email address in the "From:" field, thereby sending directly on behalf of the user.

This is how it may look in your Mandrill account: http://imgur.com/QfukbUA.png / http://imgur.com/On7yr2a.png

I've created this little plugin that does the following:
- Rewrite the "From:" field to be a "Reply-To:" field
- Add a new "From:" field that uses the webmaster email address (as set in vBulletin options)

It's really as simple as that.

Note! This plugin applies to all mail send from your forum. On mails already send with your webmaster email address in the "From:" field the changes made by this plugin are redundant, but won't interfere.

As a bonus, if you use your Mandrill account for multiple sites and use their "sub account" feature, you can also specify the sub-account in this plugin, just uncomment the 2nd line and set your sub-account name.

(This is my first published mod, I hope you like it & I didn't mess anything up...)

[z3r0]

Thanks, this solved the issue I was having with Amazon SES not sending contact us emails.