settig up mail()

Immyphp

hi im using a program called wamp which runs php and mysql and apache enviroment on your home pc so you can set up and build php pages with out using a online server all ways going well till i had to make a form which sends an email,

for this i have to set php with relevant

this is the error message i get

Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Failed to connect to mailserver at "localhost" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php.ini or use ini_set()

i assume i require a email address to use as a receiving email and smpt settings i do not know wat smpt is ,

when the wamp server asks for me these details what should i put it

in basic i just want the mail fuction to work

just for the sake of it i have added the code here too

<?php

//create short variable names
$name=$POST['name'];
$email=$POST['email'];
$feedback=$_POST['feedback'];

//set up some static information
$toaddress = "feedback@example.com";

$subject = "Feedback from web site";

$mailcontent = "Customer name: ".$name."\n".
"Customer email: ".$email."\n".
"Customer comments:\n".$feedback."\n";

$fromaddress = "From: webserver@example.com";

//invoke mail() function to send mail
mail($toaddress, $subject, $mailcontent, $fromaddress);

?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Bob's Auto Parts - Feedback Submitted</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Feedback submitted</h1>
<p>Your feedback has been sent.</p>
</body>
</html>

thanks guys once mail() is set up i should be ready to fly 😃

sneakyimp

The problem here is that WAMP is looking on your desktop computer for a program that handles sending mail. I'd be willing to bet that you don't have such a process running on your machine.

I would highly recommend using PHPMailer. You can set it up to send mail through pretty much any mail server and it's not very complicated. It also will protect you against certain security issues where people try to inject headers and stuff.

Immyphp

hey thanks sneakyimp , like the name

heres what ive done ive downloaded phpMailer, and extracted it, its in my documents folder at the moment i have found a site which instructs me on how to set up the environment to use phpmailer i e. make it global.

To install just extract package and copy to your PHP library path (/usr/lib/php) so it become globaly visible and then in your php script add this line:

require("class.phpmailer.php");

here come the questions, does it mater which folder its extracted to? does the entire phpmailer folder have to be in a certain folder relative to the php folder.

i have to make changes to the path file, where do i find this? and what do i add, i have got old experiences of path files from my msdos days , so i do kinda get what they are trying to get me to do, or am i totally of.

lastly does the mail() function work with this? thanks for all your help
im sorry if this is tedious i am on my quest to find out as much as i can

sneakyimp

the mail() function does not work with phpmailer. You have to instantiate a PHPMailer object and use it to set the mail recipient, subject, etc.

the instruction to extract the package to your /usr/lib/php folder probably doesn't apply in WAMP. I'm not super familiar with where it would need to be so I'm afraid I'm not much help there. You can however extract the package into your public_html directory (where your PHP project is) and then include it with a relative path.

Hope that makes sense.