Background: If you have set up a local apache server for development purposes you may have run into
the problem where sendmail takes a long time (at least one minute) to send emails. This is extremely frustrating if you are trying to debug a problem with an email you have generated.
There are several forum posts on
the internet that discuss this problem. However, none of theme described what to do in enough detail for my limited knowledge. Here are
the steps that worked for me:
1) find your hostname (in case you've forgotten it) using this command:
:~$ cat /hosts/hostname
myhostname
2) edit
the file /etc/hosts and make sure
the first line is
the following:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost myhostname
3) edit
the sendmail configuration file ( /etc/mail/sendmail.cf in Ubuntu) and
Uncomment
the line #O HostsFile=/etc/hosts
4) Restart
the computer.
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.
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]');
My question for my fellow serverfaulters is:
What further changes can be made so that I don't have to use
the sendmail -f option? Although it's not very hard to add
the -f option, it is a problem when your CMS (such as Drupal) does not use
the -f option when sending mail. You would need to hack a core module to add this option.
