mail() problems

Anon

I'm running PHP v4.0.2 and I cannot for the life of me get the mail() function to work at all. I had everything just printed to the screen to see if anything wierd was going on, but everything is perfect. I tried passing the parameters to it through variables and that didn't work... so I tried just hard coding all the parameters into the function and that didn't work. I searched through the forums for messages and saw that a lot of people were putting "@" in front of the mail function like @mail(..) so I tried that and that didn't work. So I'm wondering why it's not working, any ideas? Are you supposed to have the SMTP protocol enabled for it to work properly or something?

Anon

could you please post your script so we can try to find out what may be incorrect or missing?
thanks

yelvington

If you are not running Linux or Unix, you may not have a mail transfer agent on your machine. Under Windows you have to provide the name of an SMTP mail relay. See php.ini. Look for a section labeled

[mail function]

Anon

Sorry about forgetting to post the code:

<?PHP
$to = "mdelange@idirect.ca";
$subj = "test";
$msg = "This is a test";

mail($to,$subj,$msg);
?>

That's all there is to it.

I'm running Linux and I've got all services except HTTP blocked out by my firewall.

Mike

yelvington

If you're running Linux, make sure you have a mail transfer agent installed and properly configured. Examples would be sendmail, qmail, postfix, exim, et cetera. I use Postfix, which comes with the current Mandrake installation. Any of the "alternative" MTAs will install a "sendmail-alike" script as /usr/lib/sendmail and /usr/sbin/sendmail, so the default php.ini settings should work fine. It should not matter that you are behind a firewall, since SMTP is an outgoing service and not an incoming service.

Anon

Ya, thanks for your message. I did a little more searching aroung the 'net and found that you do have to have SMTP enabled so I spent a little time configuring it and now everything works properly.

Thanks for everyone's help.

Mike