Using mail() on IIS 5

[bcfc1982]

I'm trying to incorporate the php mail() function in an application I am writting.

I'm running Win 2000 Server. I've set up a new remote domain named localhost under IIS Admin and I've checked the Allow incoming mail to be relayed to this domain option.

I've added the following to the php.ini

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
SMTP = localhost

I'm using the following script which I'm running from the DOS command line.

<?php
/ Display a text message /

$myname = "Me Myself";
$myemail = "[e-mail]";
$myreplyemail = "[e-mail]";

$contactname = "Mister Contact";
$contactemail = "[e-mail]";

$message = "hello from happy me";
$subject = "A mail not refused by Hotmail";

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";

mail($contactemail, $subject, $message, $headers);

?>

I get the following error message...

D:\php>php email.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.2.2
Content-type: text/html

PHP Warning: Server Error in D:\php\email.php on line 16

Any ideas on where I'm going wrong? I am new to IIS and PHP.

[jerdo]

First, do you have a mail server running on localhost? If not that probably won't work. Second, versions of PHP prior to 4.3.0 do not support all headers in mail() function on Windows servers. Check this page for what can and can't be done with mail() on Windows:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php
the info about the headers is in the box labeled Warning.

[id10t]

I just went thru this.

You have to use ini_set to set the SMTP server and sendmail_from values in your script - for some reason, it doesn't read them from the .ini file.

ini_set("SMTP","you.mailserver.com");
ini_set("sendmail_from","[e-mail]");

and then it should work for you.

[bcfc1982]

Hey thanks,
I added the code as you suggested,

ini_set("SMTP","you.mailserver.com");
ini_set("sendmail_from","[e-mail]");

really dumb question but if I have my remote domain named localhost do I then add the following?

ini_set("SMTP","localhost");

I didn't get the Server error but the email execution didn't seem to work.

[id10t]

The name localhost always resolves to whatever computer you are sitting at (or in this case where the script and PHP engine are sitting at), and the numerical equivalent is 127.0.0.1 . So unless you are running a mailserver on that computer, the mail function isn't going to work. Not sure why you didn't get an error message of some sort. Also, some mailservers will check to see where a message is originating from - if it can't match the name up properly, the message is forwarded to /dev/null . Had this happen when I first got it going as well.

[bcfc1982]

Hi,
I'm not getting an error message but my mail function still doesn't appear to be working. What (where) do I find /dev/null? I think the program must be sending mail out and then that's it. Do you know of any good techniques to debug situations like this?

[Lisa-Marie]

did you change the [mailfunction] section of the php.ini file?

for example, I changed mine to read...

SMTP = mail.netrover.com;

sendmail_from = [e-mail];