Different mail() function behaviour

[nobru]

Hi all,

I send a test email to a fake email address (such as [e-mail]).
When I do it offline, the mail() function returns an error (which makes sense since "creqcfrcfrqc" domain does not exist).
But when I do it online from my website (with exactly the same script), the script sends the mail and does not report any error.

So I guess there must be a configuration difference between the online and offline systems, but I have no clue what it could be.

Anyone has an idea ?

Thanks in advance !

[traq]

When you're testing locally, you're getting an error (presumably) because you don't have a local mail server set up, so [man]mail/man can't send the email.

On your live server, that's not the case. The email is sent just fine.

Now, that doesn't mean that the email address exists or that the message will ever be received by anybody.

[nobru]

Well, the mail() function works fine on my local PC, I can send emails with it, it is no problem.
The strange thing is that I have this piece of code that says something like :
if(!mail(...)){ echo("error");}
And with a fancy email address such as [e-mail], it would return false on my local machine (windows), and true on the live system (unix).

Maybe it is just a windows/unix difference ?
Or there is a configuration difference somewhere ?

[bradgrafelman]

On your Windows PC, it's possible that PHP is configured to directly connect to an SMTP server to send the message, and it's possible that the SMTP server is smart enough to do a domain lookup before it accepts the message for delivery.

On the *nix setup, PHP is probably configured to use some local MTA daemon (sendmail, for example) rather than directly interface with a remote MTA (as in above). In this case, mail() returns true simply because the local MTA accepted your message and queued it for delivery.