How to test Mercury Mail on my computer

[fridgedocgtor]

Hi all, Im designing a site in Dreamweaver, and as of yet, the pages I have created are not published, as I want to try and get the most important part of my site functioning first, my form that users fill out to request service. AFter clicking submit, and they are verified to be human visitors, their info is sent to me in an email, they get redirected to confirmation page. What Im trying to do just so I can start testing the php code for all this, is to setup a mail server on my computer for testing purposes. I have installed XAMPP on my Win XP, I have Apache 2, MySQL, and Mercury all running. How do I or what program do I use to send myself a test email on my localhost server?

thanks in advance

FD

[JonB]

"sendmail"

[Sharley]

Using Mercury is not advisable for your specific needs as Mercury is a full blown Mail Transport Agent.

Most ISP will not permit a full MTA on their client's PC with access to the Internet as they are usually used for spam, which can have the ISP and it's IP blocks banned, and they don't like that at all - Mercury is fine on a large LAN though.


All you need do is setup sendmail and make a small edit in your php.ini file to be able to send email from a web form.

I have recently posted on this topic and these advanced search results may help you find your solution - these results may not be relevant to the new XAMPP 1.7.4 version as you did not included the version you are using.

For 1.7.4 you may need to look at this topic in the above results:
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=34510

Good luck and best wishes.

[fridgedocgtor]

Sharley, thank you very much for your reply. I just need a couple of quick clarifications; the first, in reading over your tutorial, you state to make changes in the php.ini file located in the xampp/apache/bin folder, however, the file I searched and found was located in the xampp/php folder, so just to check, is that the file i should make the changes to: secondly, your instructions state-
[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
SMTP = smtp.myisp.com <--add here your ISP email server that you use in your normal email client. since i am testing on my computer, would this be "smtp.localhost" or "smtp.localhost/testsite"?
smtp_port = 25 <--normally port 25 but change to the one provided by your ISP if different.

; For Win32 only.
;sendmail_from = me@example.com <--uncomment this line and add your email address. And would this be "mytestuser@localhost" or "mytestuser@localhost/testsite"?

; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
;sendmail_path = "C:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.exe -t"


Part of my confusion is ive never set up a test server on my computer before, so the localhost web address stuff confuses me.

thank you again for your very considerate help of a newbie

[WilliL]

; For Win32 only.
SMTP = smtp.myisp.com <--add here your ISP email server that you use in your normal email client. since i am testing on my computer, would this be "smtp.localhost" or "smtp.localhost/testsite"?
smtp_port = 25 <--normally port 25 but change to the one provided by your ISP if different.

; For Win32 only.
;sendmail_from = me@example.com <--uncomment this line and add your email address. And would this be "mytestuser@localhost" or "mytestuser@localhost/testsite"?

ISP means Internet Service Provider
if your e-mail adress is: fridgedocgtor@web.com
SMTP = smtp.web.com OR mail.web.com --> have a look to your account or provider data
sendmail_from = fridgedocgtor@web.com

have a look to: http://community.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=34510
This description works well

[fridgedocgtor]

So, even though I am setting this up to test on my own computer test server, I have to use my actual internet service provider's information for the php.ini settings?

Oh, and I am using XAMPP version 1.7.3

[WilliL]

pardon, but did you read the post above?
sendmail for XAMPP 1.7.3, its working for me:

Code: Select all

# Example for a user configuration file

# Set default values for all following accounts.
defaults
logfile "C:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.log"

# myaccount
account WAK
tls on
tls_certcheck off
host mail.mydomain.de
from mymail@mydomain.de
auth on
user myusername
password mypassword

# A freemail service example (origin excample)
account Hotmail
tls on
tls_certcheck off
host smtp.live.com
from [exampleuser]@hotmail.com
auth on
user [exampleuser]@hotmail.com
password [examplepassword]

# Set a default account
account default : WAK