using the mail() function

[nick1]

Greetings,

To start, here are my system specs:
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server
Apache2, MySQL, PHP5
(chose LAMP installation option during install of Ubuntu)
IPKungFu (firewall, all out-bound traffic is allowed)

My mail.php script:

[code]<?php
$to = '[email protected]';
$subject = 'the subject';
$message = 'hello';
$headers = 'From: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
  'Reply-To: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
  'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
?> [/code]

I copied the code from http://us2.php.net/function.mail simply to see if the mail function would work.  Of course I replaced '[email protected]' with my real email address.
Now when I run mail.php, I'm not seeing an email in my inbox.  I waited for a few more minutes and refreshed my inbox, but still no email.  I'm new to the mail() function so I'm not sure what all is required to properly run it.  Does the mail() function require a mail server to be installed on my Ubuntu box?  I hope not, since all I want to use the mail() function for is to send myself alerts if certain parts of my code fail.

Thank you for your time,

*Nick*

[tomfmason]

Ok. You will need to have a mail server installed to be able to use the mail function.


Well maybe not...

You could write a socket script that will use a free emails out going smtp server(.i.e. Gmail). That is somewhat difficult. I would say that would be for the moderate to high level php scripter.

Another alterative is the ether write a log file or use a database to store the errors. This is what I would do.

Good luck,
Tom