[thelist] Setting up a mail server (qmail) - or do I even have to?

Jason Lustig lustig at acsu.buffalo.edu
Fri Jan 12 16:43:35 CST 2001


OK... I use PHP (and NO, this is _not_ a PHP-specific question), and the way
you send mail in PHP through the script is using the mail() function. I'm
trying to get it to work for me, but whenever I try to send mail (the key
word is "try"), I get an error like this:

"Cannot connect to thisemail at thisdomain.com"

I asked the people at phpbuilder.com's forums, and they told me to set up a
mail server, and pointed me to qmail. My own university uses qmail for its
very large email system, so I am guessing it is pretty good. Anyway, I'm
building & testing my application (a message board system) on a
win98-Apache-PHP 4.03 system - and I have no idea how to set this up, or if
I even have to. I don't have the energy or bandwith to download Unix or
Linux, so I'm pretty much stuck with microsoft's buggy products for the time
being. Do I have to set up a mail server?

If yes, how would I go about doing that? I'm having problems with my
downloaded version of qmail, and I don't want to mess anything up. The
documentation that I was looking at on the internet wasn't too helpful for
windows... if you could point me somewhere where there's an article or
documentation, that would be nice. :)

If not, perhaps you could explain what might be going wrong. My line of code
is:

mail("$email","subject","message");

where, obviously, $email is the person's email to send it to. Do I have to
do something before the mail() function that I'm not doing? It's not making
any sense to me. And PHP isn't giving me parse errors.

The idea that I need a mail server makes sense, but I don't know how to set
it up. Any help here would be greatly accepted. Thanks in advance for
anything, anything at all.

--Jason

http://www.alternate-universe.org/

*****

Your signiture determines your reality





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