mail() timeout issue

Question

When I execute my email script via browser a timeout fatal error is returned (unless I drastically increase the execution time, then it will run ok, not the solution I'm looking for). The email is sent tho, but it takes forever (5 min. average) to arrive (at my inbox)!
(Considering that via command line it works perfectly I think that SMTP at php.ini is certainly well configured.)

So this is the code executed by browser request:

<?php
mail('[email protected]', 'test subject', 'test body', 'From: Andre Matos <[email protected]>');
?>

and when I run this same (is it really the same? I'm starting to doubt myself) code via command line:

php -r "mail('[email protected]', 'test subject', 'test body', 'From: Andre Matos <[email protected]>');"

it works perfectly! The script runs, it stop and the email arrives instantly (2/3 seconds).

So, what can cause this difference and how to fix it? Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

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[edit] some extra info:
- the machine is windows
- the server is localhost
- php.ini is the same for both the browser and the cli instance

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[edit2]
Thank you all for trying to guess which was the problem. I placed the question hopping that someone had the problem before and knew of something specific. Given nothing specific showed up and none of the suggestions really worked, I've decided to accept the one that allowed me to reach more conclusions about the problem... +1 For all your helpful knowledge/thoughts (/guesses) :-)

Answer 1

I've hypothesised some couses, but I used to linux and on windows I can olny guess:

1. php_cli and mod_php are 2 different binaries, mod_php can be slightly damaged
2. php_cli and mod_php use 2 different users, the network profile of apache user can be the problem (dns, firewall, proxy...)
3. your php script is on "problematic" location or contains some problematic character, but your cli script is by param, try to execute same script: php -f z:\path\to\php\mail.php

Answer 2

Given this note from http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php, it seems very likely that the issue is with the MTA and not PHP directly:

The Windows implementation of mail() differs in many ways from the Unix implementation. First, it doesn't use a local binary for composing messages but only operates on direct sockets which means a MTA is needed listening on a network socket (which can either on the localhost or a remote machine).

Perhaps it has something to do with the way the MTA is responding to the particular user, or user-specific firewall rules for outgoing mail connections on your machine. Can you run the command-line as the web server user rather than yourself? If so, does that re-create the problem from the command-line?

How about having the web server execute the command-line PHP rather than the parsed PHP file? (For example, perhaps you can run a batch script via CGI.) Does that solve the problem?

(Sorry that these are more guesses than definite answers.)