This wasn’t intended to be my first post, but I just finished getting email working for this blog, so I figured why not post how I got it work. We can always do an intro later.
For this blog and another blog I just started, www.playingwithpython.com, I setup a Linux server to host the sites using Apache. After getting the sites setup, I went to setup a couple security plugins that send email alerts. Unfortunately, emails were not working.
Being a fairly recent adopter of Linux, these type of issue are never light bulb moments for me. It takes hitting up Google for the answers. Typically, I scour the web for a couple hours trying pull enough pieces together to get the puzzle put together. This was no different.
In order to save you the time that I wasted, let me just post the steps I did to get this working.
First, I immediately figured I didn’t load sendmail, since I loaded a barebones linux install for this server. So, first step is to load Sendmail.
Install Sendmail:
- Since I’m running CentOS, I installed sendmail with “yum install sendmail”.
- Next, I set the service to start automatically with the “chkconfig sendmail on” command.
- Lastly, start the service with “service sendmail start”.
Alright, send mail is loaded and allows local host by default. Let’s go test these emails again….. nope. Still not working. I was getting the error “Could not instantiate mail function”.
I went to check the logs in the file /var/log/maillog and found the error…
NOQUEUE: SYSERR(apache): can not chdir(/var/spool/clientmqueue/): Permission denied
The problem now is SELinux. You can test and resolve this issue via the following commands:
- Check to see if httpd can sendmail by running “getsebool -a | grep mail”.
- See if “httpd_can_sendmail –> on” shows. If it says off, SELinux is blocking httpd from initiating sendmail.
- Run “setsebool -P httpd_can_sendmail on” to fix SELinux.
You should now be able to send emails via WordPress’s, well really PHP’s mail() function.
