Apache Friends Support Forum

2 weeks ago I had mercury and outlook express working together fine. I would use xampp to send a email with a php form and it would show up in my outlook express. It took me awhile to get it to work so once it was working all I did was shut everything down for the night and I have not changed any settings since then (i.e. php.ini, email, or xampp) Now with out me changing any settings from when it worked, I come back to do some testing 2 weeks later and it wont work. Are there any settings that would have changed by themselves ?????

I have made sure that outlook express is on the correct account and I only use it for testing, and I have not used xampp since the email test forms worked properly, so I never changed any of the settings physically my self.

The error code I get is :
Warning:mail() [function.mail]:SMTP sever response:530 authentication required - "for help go to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/pop/pop-11.html" in C:/x/htdocs/form test/mailform.php on line 10
I know the php code is fine because it worked previously and has not been changed, I dont see how my router or modem would cause this as I didnt have to be online for it to work last time, which makes me think it is not related to dynamic i.p.'s either.....I am not even sure where to begin looking since I did not change any info or settings (no one else uses this computer besides me) all names, passwords, hosts, php.ini, localhost properties, etc... are the same

Also when I send an email from outlook to outlook, mercury to outlook, outlook to postmaster@localhost, using localhost it sends and recieves fine, but if I use the XAMPP homepge > tools - mercury mail I get "message was not successfully sent" or if I use the "internet explorer - localhost page" to run the php contact form I get the above error code

Hopefully with the idea that I did not physically change any settings that worked previously it will help narrow down the things that I should be looking at...if someone could point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

Your 530 error message is telling you that the email address you are trying to send email through requires a user/pass before it can send the email - this has nothing to do with the recipient but the SMTP server you are sending through, for example to send mail through your ISP, your ISP usually requires authentication before sending.

To send email from a php form, the simplest and most practicable way is to use the fake sendmail app included in XAMPP and is configured to access in the apache\bin\php.ini file.

A forum search for sendmail should give some good results on how to do this as sendmail has the ability to send authentication by adding those details in the sendmail configuration file - xampp\sendmail\

Unless you are running a busy Local Area Network in a commercial organization then MercuryMail is over kill for a small family home LAN and really not needed.

Are there any settings that would have changed by themselves

No XAMPP nor MercuryMail change setting all by themselves - any edits you made that appeared to have worked but in fact you failed to restart Apache or MercuryMail after these edits then those edits would have been recognised when you eventually restarted the XAMPP components 2 weeks later.

With regard to configurations you have made/changed in XAMPP/Apache/PHP or MercuryMail we can only guess, as you have failed to include those in your post and so we have no way of knowing how you first configured your email settings that worked and then mysteriously stopped working.