Create development environment on a domain WITHOUT email-functions

[MortenH]

Its a pretty basic request, but im not able to find any solution.

I have a server running plesk with a couple of sites on it. I would like to make a complete copy of one of the sites (a joomla installation) and install it on a different domain-name for development. Problem is, that for this to be efficient, i need the site to be a complete copy - and thus, it keeps sending mails out to the users, who will become confused about getting mails from this "fake" copy of the site.

Is it even possible to turn of mailing all together?

Quite simply, i need a fully functional copy of my site which i can access and work on at a seperate domain, but it can not be allowed to send out emails!

 

[IgorG]

Look at option

-mail_service <true|false> Turns on/off the mail service

for /usr/local/psa/bin/domain CLI utility.

 

[MortenH]

As far as i can see, the mail service is turned off, but that doesn't seem to have any effect on the sites mail-functions (mailforms and notifications like password reminders).

(this is from /usr/local/psa/bin/dns --info )

Mail Accounts
=============================
Mail service: Off
Total : 0
Access to Panel: 0
Mailboxes: 0
Mail forwarders: 0
Mail groups: 0
Auto-replies: 0
Total size: 4.00 KB
Traffic: 0 B/Month

 

[Faris Raouf]

Turning off mail in Plesk won't have any effect at all on this.

Hmm......

How about disabling the mail function in PHP. Will that do the trick? You'd need to test first, and make sure joomla uses that function and doesn't try to communicate with sendmail (it would require safe mode off) or alternatively works like a mail client and connects to localhost. And unfortunately I suspect it does one of these two things. For the latter, you could specify an incorrect IP. For the former, maybe disable safe_mode.

If none of this works, you'd have to switch mail off on the server completely or something radical like that.

Or......ok, this is a good one....if Joomla uses sendmail, you can create a perl wrapper around sendmail. You'll find a KB about locating the source of spam and a wrapper that helps you do so...you can try to modify that wrapper to maybe drop any email sent from domain.tld (as used by the joomla installation) (and just log it, maybe)?? I'm not saying it will work, but it might

 

[MortenH]

I have tried setting mail to off in the php.ini, but for some reason that didn't work.

Regarding the last one, that actually doesnt sound bad! - im no Pearl-guy though. I would have no idea how to do that. There is a spamfilter in the plesk-panel though. Maybe that could be set-up to block any outgoing with my testdomain.tld as a parameter?

 

[Faris Raouf]

In the standard Plesk configuration, spamassassin doesn't scan outgoing mail, only incoming, so I don't think that would work.