Mercury won't start

[NorthLake]

I'm having a serious problem with Mercury. While trying to set up Mercury to connect to the outside world (I'm still new to all the server stuff) I had to restart mercury. After shutting down Mercury via the Xampp control panel, it wouldn't start again. Well, it does actually start, but the admin button does nothing, the icon isn't showing on the taskbar and the server itself isn't responding (meaning I couldn't get or send e-mails). I can see the proces in task manager, but I can't do anything with it accept kill it from task manager or stop the service from xampp. There are no logs about any kind of error in C:\xampp\MercuryMail\LOGS, and I don't know where to look for inside of event viewer. Has anybody got a solution to this, or do I have to reinstall xampp?
P.S. I don't have any backups

[Nobbie]

Its not worth to fix that problem (if you can fix it - nobody knows), because you wont be able to send e-mails from your private computer anyway. The problem is, that all major mail providers (like GMX etc.) are blocking mails from private servers (they analyze your IP). All your e-mails will go into the trashbox and none of them will reach somebody. Therefore i cannot see any use in running a Mercury Mailserver on a private PC, and unfortunately it is a very sophisticated task to setup a mailserver, even if you fix your current problem, you might fail to setup Mercury correctly.

Thats all in vain, spend your time for something different.

[NorthLake]

Its not worth to fix that problem (if you can fix it - nobody knows), because you wont be able to send e-mails from your private computer anyway. The problem is, that all major mail providers (like GMX etc.) are blocking mails from private servers (they analyze your IP). All your e-mails will go into the trashbox and none of them will reach somebody. Therefore i cannot see any use in running a Mercury Mailserver on a private PC, and unfortunately it is a very sophisticated task to setup a mailserver, even if you fix your current problem, you might fail to setup Mercury correctly.

Thats all in vain, spend your time for something different.

Well, thanks for keeping me from pulling my hair out out of frustration... Do you/does somebody know why they block private mail servers? I mean, it's not like all the email servers are owned by one and the same company that would therefore lose profit...

[LimpEmu]

It is worth fixing this problem even for a local pre-production server. I need it to test e-mail functions in my application, so if anybody has any idea, I would appreciate it. I got it to work on one of my test servers, but not on a second one.

[Nobbie]

You dont need Mercury to test your scripts, there is a fake mail software (i think its part of Xampp), which simply puts the emails (which are send by your App) into a local folder, so you can check if they were looking correctly. You only cannot deliver the emails to the outer world.

Or, you can use the sendmai which comes with Xampp, this requires an "official" email provider (you have to config/apply real SMTP Server Data), for example Google Mail, and it sends the mails via that SMTP server. But you cannot send Emails directly from your private internet account, that simply will be blocked anyway (due to SPAM reasons).