Original Post
I was recently hired to write a simple PHP script for a client wishing to send out mailing lists to his fans. It's a relatively simple script that uses the mail() function at it's core. I fully tested the script on my own server and things worked absolutely fine. I moved the script to my client's web-server, where we tested it somewhat thoroughly. So he tries his first real run of the script to send out a mail to about 600 e-mail addresses. This is 600 sequential calls to mail() from within a FOR loop. He tells me that everything was working fine, until somewhere during process something went wrong. Now the script, and the directory the script was in is completely inaccessible. Thank god the script wasn't in his root directory, or things could've have really went bad. The permissions are set to '000' and I cannot change a thing from FTP or from his WWW CPanel. I did a test on my own server with the same number of addresses and I had no issues. I tried to contact his web-host on his behalf. Unfortunately this is one of those web-hosts with really crappy support and no phone number...so I'm still waiting for a reply. Has this happened to anybody before? Did my script break his server somehow? Is this a security measure put in place by the web-host or even PHP/Apache? What would cause the permissions on the script and it's parent directory to be changed to '000'? (My script does not change permissions - all it does is read/write files and send mail()) Thank you for any help.