mail() not sending mail, help please

[johnh]

Hello all, I am having a tough time figuring out why the mail() builtin php function does not work on my server. I am running PHP 4.2.2. Slackware 8.0, sendmail 8.12.5.
Has anyone seen this? Could it be a php.ini or sendmail issue?

As far as I can tell, sendmail doesn't even get the message. But nothing complains. I don't see an error on the screen, nor in any logs. So I'm having trouble locating the problem. I would appreciate any help.

As a strange complication, I installed PHP in both the CGI mode and as an addon to Apache (I love to shell script in PHP). If I use the mail() function from a cgi/shell script it works perfectly. (yes the path to php is correct here)

#!/usr/local/php/bin/php
<?PHP
mail("[e-mail]","Test","Body");
?>

Thank you,
John

[ajmoore]

Have you double checked your mail settings in the php.ini file? Take a look at the "sendmail_path" directive....

[rcmehta_14]

I think this must be the problem of sendmail.

First check that the mail() function return true or not. If it returns true that means the problem is outside of PHP world.

Now after checking that mail() returns true, try "mailq" comman on Linux prompt (or postqueue -p) if u r using postfix for sending mails. If this command shows /var/spool is empty, it means that the mails are exactly sent, if it shows some garbage things like Sender/Reciever bla...bla...bla....... Then there must be some problem with sendmail.

Check it and let me know about the result

[johnh]

I checked the path, it was blank, so I quickly set it. I restarted apache and this did not fix it. I also tried with some params and that did not work either.
sendmail_path="/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -OQueueDirectory=/var/spool/mqueue/"

Next, I setup a simple script to test for a value returned by mail().

<?PHP
$val = mail("[e-mail]","Subject","Body");
print "V: $val\n";
?>

$val returned nothing (blank), not a 0. If run from the command line:

#!/usr/local/php/bin/php
<?PHP
$val = mail("[e-mail]","Subject","Body");
print "V: $val\n";
?>

It returns a 1, and I get the mail. I also ran mailq right after running the web page version and it showed 0 in the queue.
root@mail# mailq
/var/spool/mqueue is empty
Total requests: 0

Any other ideas for me?
Thanks a bunch for the suggestions so far.

John

[johnh]

I am not able get anywhere with this issue. Does someone have any more advice for me? I need the mail() function to work.

Thanks
John

[pheeh]

Look through your mail logs to make sure that sendmail is able to write to the mqueue...I found that was my problem.

[johnh]

That is exactly what I found as well. When I created the smmsp user and the smmsp group, the user was a member of the normal "users" group and not "smmsp" group. Once that was found, it worked.

Sorry for not marking this as resolved. I had forgotten.

John