Need help troubleshooting a PHP mail problem

**Bob** · 06-17-2003, 09:43 PM

The PHP mail() function does not work on my server. I need somebody that is familiar with pHP installations and debugging to help me figure out what is wrong.

Please give me your price to help.

Thank you.

-Bob

**moxsum** · 06-18-2003, 12:39 AM

Ill try to help. Can you post your code that isnt working? thx.

**Bob** · 06-18-2003, 07:27 AM

The mail function simply does not work. Here is the entire code that I am using:

<?php
$recipient = "syates88@hotmail.com";
$subject = "Test from PHP";
$message = "Testing mail body";
mail("$recipient","$subject","$message");
?>

< html>< head>< title>< /title>< /head>
< body>
Testing mail via pHP 
recipient: < ?php echo "$recipient"; ?> 
subject: < ?php echo "$subject"; ?> 
message: < ?php echo "$message"; ?> 

< /body>< /html>

NOTE: I put a space after the html tags so they woudl display correctly here. . .

I get no errors. The HTML displays fine with no PHP warnings.

In the php.ini file, the path to sendmail it correctly defined.

-Bob

**Ciqala** · 06-18-2003, 08:53 AM

if you put

$result = mail("$recipient","$subject","$message");

what does $result return? true or false?

**Ciqala** · 06-18-2003, 08:56 AM

from php.net comments on the mail() function...

This is a problem I ran into that really had me stumped for awhile.

I was using mail() to send messages from a bulletin board I created via a form in order to keep users email addresses private (read no email mining possible). Problem was some people were not getting the messages. After testing on MANY different email accounts I was beginning to get stumped.

It seems that some ISP's and servers require that the Return-Path header email address match the From email address in order for it to be passed onto the users account. By adding

-f email@address.com

as the last parameter in the mail function to the same as the From address everything started getting recieved as it should. Here's two examples.

mail($to, $subject, $body, $from);

resulted in some people not receiving the message.

but...

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

everyone got the message as intended.

Hope this helps someone else out as it had me totally baffled until I started comparing the full headers of my email messages.

perhaps this is the cause of your problems...

**Bob** · 06-18-2003, 10:13 AM

Originally posted by Ciqala
if you put

$result = mail("$recipient","$subject","$message");

what does $result return? true or false?

Ciq: I tried that previously and it was not returning ANYTHING..

At any rate, the problem was SOLVED.

The path to sendmail in the php.ini file was /usr/sbin/sendmail.

Apparantly, it needed the -t -i switches. All is good in mailville now

-Bob