Posted by Rasmus Lerdorf on 10/03/07 11:05

Nathaniel Price wrote:
> I've been searching for the solution to this problem to no avail.
>
> I recently did a clean install of FC3 on a server that was running RH8.
> There were a number of PHP scripts that I had configured to send out
> email for notices or passwords or the like. However, now that I've
> upgraded I can't send mail through the mail() command in PHP.
>
> My problem is exactly like what I found here, but unfortunately that
> question was left unanswerd:
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-December/msg06708.html
>
> To summarize, I have no problem sending email via SMTP (one of the apps
> I run has the option to choose between using PHP mail() or using it's
> own SMTP client). Whenever I try to send mail with mail(), apache logs
> the following error:
> sendmail: fatal: chdir /var/spool/postfix: Permission denied
> Postfix logs nothing.
>
> I have checked the permissions on the /var/spool/postfix directory, and
> they seem to be in order:
> drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 Nov 23 05:11 postfix
>
> php.ini is configured with:
> sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i
>
> /usr/sbin/sendmail is a link to /etc/alternatives/mta which is a link to
> /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix. All of these are world readable and executable.
>
> This setting is not overriden anywhere else (tested with phpinfo()).
>
> Does anyone know what's wrong and how to fix it? If not, is there a
> drop-in replacement for the sendmail command that will just forward the
> request to postfix via SMTP?

As always, the way to debug this is to sudo to the web server user id
and issue the /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i command on a mail message and
figure out why it isn't working. This has nothing to do with PHP.

-Rasmus

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