Sending mail takes long time in localhost

Question

I am using Ubuntu.I installed sendmail in my local host using the following command

sudo apt-get install sendmail

Now I would like to check whether mail goes from my localhost using following php code.

<?php
$to = "[email protected]";
$subject = "Test mail";
$message = "Hello! This is a simple email message.";
$from = "[email protected]";
$headers = "From:" . $from;
mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);
echo "Mail Sent.";
?> 

When i execute the code, It takes very long time and finally echo the message as Mail Sent. Is there any possibilities to fix this ?

Answer 1

Edit the file /etc/hosts and make sure the first line is the following:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost myhostname

Edit the sendmail configuration file ( /etc/mail/sendmail.cf in Ubuntu) and Uncomment the line #O:

O HostsFile=/etc/hosts

Restart the computer, or run sudo service sendmail restart.

The computer should boot up much faster now and the mail() function should return almost immediately.

HOWEVER, the emails won't actually be sent unless you follow step 5.

You must new use the sendmail -f option whenever using the mail function.

For example:

mail('[email protected]', 'the subject', 'the message', null, '[email protected]');

Answer 2

I know this question has already been answered, but I'm posting this in the hope it may help someone else looking for a different solution to this issue.

For me, I just needed to put my server's Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) into /etc/mailname. For example: server.example.com.

Restart Sendmail to apply the changes.

$ sudo service sendmail restart