sendmail user unknown - debian lenny

Question

My php's mail() function just stopped working a short while ago. It's started returning FALSE.

I am not much of a sysadmin so please forgive my ignorance.

I set my php.ini send_path option to: "sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i" and restarted apache.

Then, I learnt how to test sendmail like so:

sudo /usr/sbin/sendmail -bv mail@example.com mail@example.com... deliverable: mailer esmtp, host example.com., user mail@example.com

The example email is a real mail box.

I have also seen unknown user messages in the mail log.

Can anyone please help me debug this?

Cheers, Rim

Answer 1

It would help if you tell which mailer system you are using so you can see if the messages are stalled in the queue. Is it really sendmail, postfix, qmail, exit, what?

Meanwhile, if you want try a replacement function for the mail() function, you may want to try the smtp_mail() function which is a wrapper to use this PHP MIME e-mail message class. It takes the same parameters as mail but uses a SMTP server that you can configure to route the message.