php not sending email

Helgi_Petursson

I have a very strange problem with PHP scripts on my Linux server failing to send mail recently (the mail function returns false and no mail is sent). However this happens only if the script is running under Apache. Apache is running under the nobody user account. If I run the PHP script which sends mail from the command line as root everything works fine and the mail is sent. This leaves me wondering about if this could be some sort of a user rights problem in my system but if so I just cannot pin point what exactly could be wrong and what would need to be done in order to fix it. Has someone here experienced something similar or have some ideas regardiong a cause and a fix.

Thanks

drew010

do you have cpanel installed on there? if so there is an option in whm which can prevent users from sending mail as nobody, which is usually what apache runs as.

Helgi_Petursson

Thanks for the reply. No cpanel is not installed, there is no GUI it's just console only.

jazz_snob

From my personal log:

"2005-07-19 PHP can no longer send emails, remember, php is running as nobody on
my system; possible cause: http://www.exim.org/mail-archives/exim-dev/2005-April/msg00046.html Basically says guid < 0 causes exim to puke. I found guid of nobody is -1 by looking in exim4 spool files."

So check if you are using exim, which version is it.