PHP mail() woes

[Alex Dean]

Floyd Arguello wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:09 PM,  <fouldragon at aol.com> wrote:
>> Weird amusement:
>>
>> #service qmail stop
>> Stopping service qmail:#
>> (for some reason, it never says "[OK]", wether you stop or restart)
>>
>> Run the "send 50 messages to hopeless at invalid.invalid" script.
>>
>> Wait for it to finish - doesn't report the mail() calls failed
>>
>> restart in a panic (it is a production box after all :P)  service qmail
>> start
>>
>> They seem to have processed normally, like it respawned qmail on demand
>> of the php script requesting sendmail.  Is that how it's supposed to
>> operate?
>>
>> Also, reviewing the logs, it seems that it occurs in blocks... you'll
>> get a bunch of failures for a few days, then none for 20 days or so at
>> a time (the server typically gets 15-30 or so days uptime, and it's at
>> 29+)

FWIW, years ago I used a PHP script to send hundreds of thousands of 
emails a week with no issues, and it wasn't a whole lot more than a 
wrapper around the mail() function.  (No, not spam.  Newsletters people 
subscribed to.)

When you get a bunch of failures, are some messages sent correctly and 
others die, or does everything break during a fixed window of time? 
Having everything run fine, then everything fails for a while, then 
works again with no apparent change on your end, sounds like some 
service you're relying on is going away then coming back.

If so :
   * Maybe DNS is slow sometimes?
   * Is qmail sending mail directly, or just handing the mail off to 
another server (smarthost, I think its called)?  If that upstream server 
is busy/unavailable periodically, that would be an issue.

alex

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