Question

First a few infos:

• Debian Squeeze
• PHP 5.3.3
• PHP with mod_cgi
• I absolutely HAVE to use mail() in this case. For all my other projects I already use SMTP mailing.

I have isolated the problem of a site timeout to the PHP mail() function. This is the only line of code in a test.php file on my server:

<?php mail('[e-mail]', 'test', 'test');

Which seems to take endless and is then terminated by mod_cgi after 40 seconds. The command

php -r "mail('[e-mail]', 'test', 'test');"

on the command line sends the email instantly.

Please tell me which log files you want to see, the Apache log is this:

[Thu Jan 17 12:17:00 2013] [warn] [client 178.15.148.43] mod_fcgid: read data timeout in 40 seconds
[Thu Jan 17 12:17:00 2013] [error] [client 178.15.148.43] Premature end of script headers: test.php

I think the problem is that I accidentally ran chmod -R 775 on the root directory a few days ago. I fixed all errors already, besides this one.

Answer 1

Most likely you use 2 different php.ini versions. one for cli and one for cgi. Debian have this setup i believe.

• /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini
• /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

Make sure that your cli and cgi versions have the same email configuration and it will work.

The mail configuration key is:
[mail function]

Another possibility is that your web user does’t have access to execute sendmail.

Also check spool permissions (updated)