Problem: mail with php

[stillife]

hi all,

i've got a problem performing mail operations from php code. first off i want to know if there is a setting in php's configuration that would prevent phpinfo(); to work. i tried to check out the configuration of php on my host to determine the problem and i can't seem to do it.

the main problem, though, is that i have a mail script that works on other servers configured normally and sends information submitted to it by an html form to an e-mail address. now on my particular host, the mail function seems to fail since this returns false:

$success = mail($config['recipient'], $config['subject'], $body, $headers);
if ($success)
  echo "SUCCESS"; 

i e-mailed the host and they say that i have to either pay to use their cgi mail script or "write the whole form in php" and that would apparently solve the problem. I don't see a difference with the second approach because I thougth the only way to send e-mail with php was with mail(). can someone advise me on this, please.

Thanks a lot

[drew010]

if the mail function returns false, that means that there is no mail transfer agent set up with php.
in order for php's mail function to work, in the php.ini file, on unix servers the admin must specify the path to the mail sending program (sendmail, qmail....). php will return true if the mail successfully is piped to the mail agent (which doesnt necessarily mean the message gets sent) but it returns false if it doesnt even get to an agent.
it would appear it is their problem, and they need to go in the php.ini file and correctly fill in the sendmail_path value.

by default it ships like this in php:
; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
;sendmail_path =

it should look like
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

its possible for your host to disbale phpinfo from working, as there are options in php.ini to disable certain functions.
if you have ssh access see if you are able to view /etc/php.ini (that is a common default location).

or write a php script to do this:

<?php
$out = cat /etc/php.ini;
echo $out;
?>

if permissions dont stop you from reading it, that should work.