How can I get the error message for the mail() fun

Question

I've been using the PHP mail() function.

If the mail doesn't send for any reason, I'd like to echo the error message. How would I do that?

Something like

$this_mail = mail('[e-mail]', 'My Subject', $message);

if($this_mail) echo 'sent!';
else echo error_message;

Thanks!

Answer 1

As the others have said, there is no error tracking for send mail it return the boolean result of adding the mail to the outgoing queue. If you want to track true success failure try using SMTP with a mail library like Swift Mailer, Zend_Mail, or phpmailer.

Answer 2

You can use error_get_last() when mail() returns false.

$success = mail('[e-mail]', 'My Subject', $message);
if (!$success) {
    $errorMessage = error_get_last()['message'];
}

With print_r(error_get_last()), you get something like this:

[type] => 2
[message] => mail(): Failed to connect to mailserver at "x.x.x.x" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php.ini or use ini_set()
[file] => C:\www\X\X.php
[line] => 2

Answer 3

There is no error message associated with the mail() function. There is only a true or false returned on whether the email was accepted for delivery. Not whether it ultimately gets delivered, but basically whether the domain exists and the address is a validly formatted email address.

Answer 4

sending mail in php is not a one-step process. mail() returns true/false, but even if it returns true, it doesn't mean the message is going to be sent. all mail() does is add the message to the queue(using sendmail or whatever you set in php.ini)

there is no reliable way to check if the message has been sent in php. you will have to look through the mail server logs.

Answer 5

$e=error_get_last();
if($e['message']!==''){
    // An error function
}

error_get_last(); - return the last error that occurred

Answer 6

In my case, I couldn't get the error message in my PHP script no matter what I do (error_get_last(), or ini_set('display_errors',1);) don't show the error message

according to this post

The return value from $mail refers only to whether or not your server's mailing system accepted the message for delivery, and does not and can not in any way know whether or not you are providing valid arguments. For example, the return value would be false if sendmail failed to load (e.g. if it wasn't installed properly), but would return true if sendmail loaded properly but the recipient address doesn't exist.

I confirm this because after some failed attempts to use mail() in my PHP scripts, it turns that sendmail was not installed on my machine, however the php.ini variable sendmail_path was /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

1- I installed sendmail from my package manager shell> dnf install sendmail

2- I started it shell> service sendmail start

3- Now if any PHP mail() function fails I find the errors of the sendmail program logged under /var/mail/ directory. 1 file per user

For example this snippet is taken from my /var/mail/root file

The original message was received at Sun, 29 Jul 2018 22:37:51 +0200
from localhost [127.0.0.1]
   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<[e-mail]>
    (reason: 550 Host unknown)

My system is linux Fedora 28 with apache2.4 and PHP 7.2