Note: If you have a one-off php script that just needs to shoot out emails, consider using the PEAR Mail class, or something similar. You can just pass it an SMTP server (e.g. that of your gmail account) with credentials (e.g. your gmail login) and it will work swell. See http://email.about.com/od/emailprogrammingtips/qt/PHP_Email_SMTP_Authentication.htm
Note 2: This was done on an ubuntu server using postfix. This assumes you have postfix or sendmail installed on your server. On ubuntu you just do a ’sudo apt-get install postfix’ (or sendmail). To configure your MTA (Mail Transfer Agent e.g. Postfix, sendmail, etc.) to be secure, you’ll need to take additional steps, beyond the scope of this article. If you’re not concerned about the contents of you’re email being sniffed out, you’re probably ok if you’re just using outbound mail (a null client) with no smtp server listening for incoming traffic on port 25. I personally don’t care if a comment from someone using my website is emailed to me in plaintext (but maybe they would). See http://www.n8williams.com/devblog/linux/using-postfix-on-linux-for-sending-only-outgoing-messages for postfix null client setup for just outgoing mail. You can do the same with sendmail, and even kill the sendmail daemons.
Open your php.ini file (ubuntu: /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) and find the line that says:
; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: “sendmail -t -i”).
;sendmail_path =
Change this, by uncommenting out the second line, to:
; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: “sendmail -t -i”).
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i
Where /usr/sbin/sendmail may be a different path for your linux distro. To find it you can issue ’sudo find / -name sendmail’ (note this does a recursive find starting at the root dir so it may take a little while, 7 seconds for me. Ctrl-C to cancel out of it when it finds it). the -t -i options have something to do with using email headers to determine who the email is from, and ignoring weird lines with a period. All I know is it has worked better with these flags. You can research them if you want.
Now here’s the crazy thing that I failed to get at first. If we’re using postfix, then why the hell are we dealing with sendmail_path? Well it turns out that sendmail_path is a common php.ini option, and the sendmail binary is commonly used by all sorts of things. So postfix, when installed, makes a sendmail binary called /usr/sbin/sendmail to be a sort-of backwards compatible sendmail interface for things that expect sendmail (which has been around for a while). So even though your calling upon a binary called sendmail, this is a postfix file. This confused me to no avail when I had installed sendmail first, than uninstalled it with the package m anager, and installed postfix. I was failing to understand why the uninstall didn’t remove the sendmail binary until I realized it was actually a postfix file after reading http://www.postfix.org/sendmail.1.html.
Now restart apache/php and the mail function should work. Let’s hope. There’s a million cluttered google results about all the various reasons why mail() runs, and may hang, but no email gets sent. One key is reading your logs. Get familiar with the mail log. On ubuntu this is /var/log/mail.err, etc.
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