mail() on *nix using ssmtp or an external smtp server?

Hello all! I have a frustrating problem with PHP and am hoping someone on the list might know a solution. I need to set up an apache server with php on Linux and AIX machines, and it all has to be in a chrooted environment. Most things work very well except for the mail() function. It appears that PHP on *nix systems is hard coded so that it is incapable of using an external smtp server instead needing a locally installed sendmail, however if php is built on a windows machine, it is hardcoded so it can only use an external smtp server. There seems to be no way around this. In terms of the design of PHP, I think this is a serrious error. As a result of the above problem, I have been looking for alternatives to sendmail, postfix, exim, and qmail because I need to not have any kind of full featured MTA in the chrooted environment. I found ssmtp[1] and esmtp[2], both of which would be satisfatory alternatives to sendmail and crew. Despite having both of these working from the command line in the chrooted environment, neither works with PHP when setting them with the "sendmail_path" option in php.ini. So my questions: - Does anyone know of a way to make PHP on *nix use an external smtp server without having to hack around in the source code of PHP? - Has anyone got either ssmtp or esmtp working with PHP? I would greatly appreciate if someone could offer a solution to me. best reagrds Markus [1]. http://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/ssmtp.html [2]. http://esmtp.sourceforge.net/