Hello

@Milo: I append my entry onto yours, because it's matching at best.

No bug?

Yes. A deprecate behaviour is, if the forum sends mails to anyone, i.e. people, which are *not* members of your forum.

The forum does send emails to anyone (deprecated or not)? I am a bit confused, because until this point of the thread I can't identify the problem.

There are a few cases I know of, one can send emails via the forum software.

1. The contact link; the forum is the sender (From), the admin (normally user #1) is the receiver (To).
2. The contact-link of an user; the forum is the sender (From), the user is the receiver (To).
3. The entry-notification; the forum is the sender (From), the user is the receiver (To).

Did I miss a case? Are the descriptions in all cases correct?

My thoughts from bottom to top.

Number 3 is a pure automatism. It should not be possible to send spam via this function except it's part of the message, but that would be another problem.

Number 2 requires the user to activate the setting to be contacted via email (as Milo said). But there is a second issue. The setting, to activate the user area and to restrict the access to the registered users or not decides who can send emails via the forum script to the users email addresses. This is the admins decision and task.

Number 1 is a problem regarding to email spam. In many countries the operator of a website (and a forum on a website) must be reachable. So the function must be accessible for anyone (including the unavoidable spammers ).

Until this point I didn't find any information about the receiver, the email headers or the content of the email in this thread. I found only a few fragments about the sender ("the forum") and the general structure of the subject, that led me to nearly nothing.

To identify the function to can say, that it works like intended, it is or maybe was a bug or it's a matter of setting settings, we need IMHO more information.

Tschö, Auge