php mail() returning false, but not in command line

Question

I've been looking around on stackoverflow and many other websites for ideas, but nothing has worked so far and I need more direct help.

I have a dedicated Ubuntu Server (9.04 jaunty) and I'm running several PHP websites there, with apache2. My problem is that the mail() function has stopped working. Since a while back I've been using PEAR Mail Queue for most emails, so I'm not sure exactly when mail() stopped working, but I still need it for an OpenCart setup, among a few other things, but mail() keeps return false no matter what I do. Even this simple code won't work:

<?php
mail('[email protected]','test','test');
?>

So, I've been looking at the Sendmail-settings in php.ini which all check out, and when I run this in the command line, it works fine and sends me an email:

# sendmail
[email protected]
test message

So I thought it might be php itself that has a problem, so I try the following command:

# php -r "mail('[email protected]','test','test');"

And it also sends the email without any problems! So what could it be? I started thinking it might be some sort of permission problem, that maybe www-data had some issues with running the script. Still not sure about this, because I can't even run this script:

<?php
echo exec('whoami');
?>

It also returns false! I've run the visudo command and added the following line just in case:

www-data ALL=(ALL) ALL

And I've changed the user and group owners of the files from root:root to www-data:www-data but still nothing!

What else can I try? There must be someting! Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Commandline and webserver don't share the same php.ini! Check which php.ini is used on commandline and in the server module.