Question

Debugging can be hectic sometimes… How do I deal with the mail function? It seems I need to change some settings but I have not idea on how I can handle them: when I try to post a reply on my forum this error is popping up:

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() in C:\xampp\htdocs\mysite\forum part two\post_reply_parse.php on line 72

my code on line 72 is this

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

my mail code is like this

$email = '';
        $email = substr($email, 0, (strlen($email) - 2));
        address with your domain at the end
        $to = "";
        $from = "";
        // $bcc is the list of emails that will be sent out as blind carbon copies
        $bcc = $email;
        $subject = "YOUR_SUBJECT_HERE";


        $message = "YOU MESSAGE CONTENT HERE";

        $headers = "From: $from\r\nReply-To: $from";
        $headers .= "\r\nBcc: {$bcc}";
        // Send out the email
        mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

I do not want to ignore this error and I would love to learn how I can fix it.

Answer 1

PHP will use sendmail on a Linux/Unix machine by default, as it is a generally available mailer service.

Windows, on the other hand, does not come packaged with one. In order to use mail() on a Windows machine, you need to install a local SMTP server or configure your PHP installation to relay messages through another SMTP server.

Note: I haven’t personally used any as I tend to do development on Linux/Unix machines, but this might work for you: http://www.hmailserver.com/