Question: I'm trying to figure out why the mail function in PHP fails when called via web browser (i.e. apache), but I can run the same script from the command line using

> 
> php -f mailtest.php 
> 
> 
> 

This is one of my client's Fedora servers, so I don't grok it completely, but I do have root access should I need to change anything.

from php.ini:

> 
> sendmail\_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i
> 
> 
> 

Not sure if this could matter, but /usr/sbin/sendmail is a symlink to /etc/alternatives/mta, which is a symlink back to /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail. FWIW the apache user does have permission to run sendmail (tested sendmail directly from the command line).

```
OS: Fedora Core 7 Linux (kernel 2.6.23.17)  
Apache: 2.2.8  
PHP: 5.2.6

```

Any help here will be greatly appreciated!

Answer: 
I found the problem. SELinux was preventing apache from being able to use sendmail. To diagnose, I used

```
$ sestatus -b | grep sendmail  
httpd_can_sendmail                   off

```

Then to actually fix the problem:

```
$ restorecon /usr/sbin/sendmail
$ setsebool -P httpd_can_sendmail 1

```

Read more about it [here](http://www.linux-archive.org/fedora-selinux-support/38002-selinux-newbie.html).
Is it a user permissions error? Your account and the one used to execute PHP scripts may have different privileges.