sending email

Sarcastic

I've been doing everything on my local machine with Windows XP running IIS5 and PHP5.

I'm trying to send data collected from a form to an email.

problem is I cant seem to get the email to send.

before going to far I've only been trying to send a simple email with the script with no luck. But if I load the same code onto our hosted server it works just fine and I receive the sample email, so I don't feel there is a problem with the code but in the php.ini file. I've tried using our ISP's SMTP server from Comcast which is smtp.comcast.net and port 25 but it still wouldn't work. So I tried the SMTP server from our hosted server with their specified port and that wouldn't work either. Finally I tried setting up a virtual smtp server on my local machine and use localhost and port 25 in the php.ini file but that didn't work either (though I'm not entirely sure I configured the virtual smtp server on my local machine correctly).

Any help on why I cant seem to send emails would be greatly appreciated. I dont want to go through uploading the page to our hosted server every time I make a change and want to test it.

NogDog

I've found the easiest solution for me to send emails via SMTP is to use PHPMailer in conjunction with the SMTP class that comes with it.

Sarcastic

forgive my ignorance as I dont know anything about PHPMailer but would my php script need to be different?

I dont want to have it written one way to work on my local machine and then have to change a bunch around to make it work on the hosted server that doesn't have PHPMailer.

I want to be able to test everything on my local machine and then copy everything over to the hosted server without issue. Is that going to be a problem with using PHPMailer on my local machine and not on the hosted server?

NogDog

PHPMailer is its own set of PHP script files that you would download, then include into your script so that it can use the classes defined in them. You could then use it on any installation by uploading those files along with your own script files (nothing has to be "installed" on the server, you just need those files uploaded where your script can include them). If on the target host you want to use the native PHP mail() function to send the email instead of SMTP, you just change one or two lines in your script to tell PHPMailer which way to send it, and it takes care of the rest.

Sarcastic

ok, now I'm more confused... i will have to do some reading on PHPMailer.

In the meantime, are there any suggestions on anything I might be missing in the php.ini file or....???

Sarcastic

well, I came in this morning planning on reading more into PHPMailer and trying that.

First though, I logged on here I decided to read around a bit. I saw something about the php.ini file might not be getting parsed and to also restart IIS after making changes to the php.ini file (which I didn't know I should do).

So I created a file with phpinfo() and opened that. Saw my SMTP listed as localhost, went into the php.ini file and changed the SMTP server from localhost to our Comcast SMTP server and saved the change. Then I restarted IIS and reopened the file with phpinfo() to make sure the change was indeed made to the SMTP server. Then I opened a the test form to see if it worked and it did!!

So I'll play around with it some more today and make sure it's working and as long as it goes well I'll update this thread with RESOLVED in the title.