How does PHP's `mail` work?

Question

PHP\'s mail function seems to deliver mail on a clean system, with no apparent configuration done by the administrator or webmaster (no SMTP configuration in

Answer 1

It's really not that reliable, actually, unless the underlying sendmail or something is properly configured.

Amazon SES has better servers than whatever server you're using and gets mail there more times than with mail().

The real reason you shouldn't use mail() is because your server's IP address is probably completely unknown to mail services such as GMail, Yahoo, etc, and there is a higher chance it will get marked as spam. Why does it get marked as spam? Because mail() is very easy and simple to exploit for spam purposes.