Slowly going insane....LINUX expert.

Anon

I know, I know this is a PHP board, but I know that a good deal of fellow Microsoft haters frequent here and I would like to ask anyway.

Scenario : I offer free email addresses with @mydomain.com through a company called bigmailbox.com. To do so : I change the MX record on my dedicated server to point mail to @mydomain.com to the servers at bigmailbox.com. For the most part this works fine. BUT (and here is the part that is driving me slowly insane) any scripts from within my site that use the PHP mail() function will not send the email to those remote servers, it insists on sending to the localhost.

I feel like I have tried making every modification EXCEPT the one needed to make the damn thing send the email OUT of the site. Do any of you know what needs to be modified to get script-generated localhost emails to mail out?

Thanks.

shivers

This is controlled by an entry in php.ini - PHP wants an SMTP server to send the mail to and the default entry is localhost.

You'll need to change this to point to the hostname of the mail server - probably by editing php.ini or possibly you might be able to change it in the code (but unlikely, cant remember offhand).

If you don't have access to php.ini and the setting can't be changed in code, then you could always write a mail function to talk to a remote SMTP server... 🙁

Anon

(smacking forehead) I have been combing through the thousands of lines of code in the apache config files, sendmail config files, etc....never even thought of PHP.ini. Thank you thank you thank you.

I am on a dedicated server and have full control over the box. I will try out the PHP.INI fix. Thank you.

Anon

Something else you can try...

In the "Shared code lib" under networking is an SMTP class that you can use to send e-mails to local/remote smtp servers.

-Ben

reagent

I believe that this option is ONLY for windows machines. i could be mistaken though. I'd follow benjamin's suggestion in that case.

Anon

PHP wants an SMTP server to send the mail
to and the default entry is localhost.
I believe that this option is ONLY for
windows machines

Yes that is indeed the case. On unixes, PHP wants to send mail by shelling a command-line mail utility called 'mail -T'...

Writing your own SMTP client isn't at all hard, until you have to start dealing with attachments. Hopefully the item Benjamin refers to from the code library already includes that.