mail() function problems

[johnh]

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");
?>

I checked the path of the sendmail directive in the php.ini and 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. I also ran mailq right after and it showed 0 in the queue.
root@mail# mailq
/var/spool/mqueue is empty
Total requests: 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 email as expected in my inbox.

I also pointed the php.ini to my /usr/bin/sendmail alias and even set permissions the same as the apache, without success.

I'm going bezerk. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
John

[Skinner]

have you created a phpinfo file and looked to see what it has to say about sendmail?

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

[johnh]

In the PHP Core I have:
sendmail_from
[e-mail] [e-mail]

sendmail_path
/usr/bin/sendmail -t -i /usr/bin/sendmail -t -i

Under the Standard section:
Path to sendmail /usr/bin/sendmail -t -i

And that is it? Is this correct?

Thanks John

[Skinner]

Looks right, so long as that is actually the path to sendmail.
My settings (under RedHat Linux) are all blank which works fine here.

I assume when you log in and run it from the CLI that you are using a valid shell. Does your web user have permission to access the sendmail binary?

[johnh]

Thanks for asking, but yes as mentioned in the first post, it has full perms and I've set it to own it as well for testing. But no dice.

[Skinner]

Well, I'm tapped out. Have you looked at the /var/log/maillog to see if there any helpful messages there?
SOme folks have had trouble getting mail from the mail() function if the return-path header didn't match the from address. You could try:

mail($to, $subject, $body, $from, "-f $from_email_address");