How can I catch an error caused by mail()?

Does anyone know how can I catch a mail error (error is displayed while sending email and the error is caused by the mailserver down) in php?

Error that was caused by emailserver down is below:

<!--2010-02-24T14:26:43+11:00 NOTICE (5): Unexpected Error: mail() [<a href='function.mail'>function.mail</a>]: Failed to connect to mailserver at "ip " port portip, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php.ini or use ini_set() (# 2).
2010-02-24 14:26:43
Username: admin
Error in line 439 of file D:\test.php
Script: /customer.php
[Global Error Handler]
-->

This is about the best you can do:

if (!mail(...)) {
   // Reschedule for later try or panic appropriately!
}

http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php

mail() returns TRUE if the mail was successfully accepted for delivery, FALSE otherwise.

It is important to note that just because the mail was accepted for delivery, it does NOT mean the mail will actually reach the intended destination.

If you need to suppress warnings, you can use:

if (!@mail(...))

Be careful though about using the @ operator without appropriate checks as to whether something succeed or not.

If mail() errors are not suppressible (weird, but can't test it right now), you could:

a) turn off errors temporarily:

$errLevel = error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);  // suppress NOTICEs
mail(...);
error_reporting($errLevel);  // restore old error levels

b) use a different mailer, as suggested by fire and Mike.

If mail() turns out to be too flaky and inflexible, I'd look into b). Turning off errors is making debugging harder and is generally ungood.

PHPMailer handles errors nicely, also a good script to use for sending mail via SMTP...

if(!$mail->Send()) {
  echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
  echo "Message sent!";
}

also using http://php.net/error_get_last will not help you out, because mail() does not emmit its errors into this function.

Only way seems to be using a proper mailer, like already suggested above.