FormMail.pl keeps reporting Bad referrer

I used FormMail.pl from Matt’s Script Archive on one of my web sites and called this script from several other web sites. This way I only need to maintain one copy of the script regarding updates.

The script began complaining about “Bad referrer” when called from my other sites, even though I could positively verify that the other site’s domain name was present in the referrers of FormMail.pl.

Not finding the problem in the script itself I began to think over what I had recently changed on the site hosting the FormMail.pl and one thing was that I recently added a http redirect any incoming calls that didn’t go to the site url using https and I also redirected www.sitename to just sitename. For example, a call to http://www.sitename was redirected to https://sitename using Apache’s http rewrite module.

On my other sites using the FormMail.pl script from the main site, I was calling the FormMail.pl using a url beginning with http://www, i.e. the call was redirected by http redirect rules. When changing the url to call the FormMail.pl script to https://sitename (i.e. using SSL and no www), the call would not be touched by http redirect rules and voila – everything was working again.