phpmailer

I'm SO excited that I can finally enable e-mail on my self-hosted drupal sites! This is going to make the whole thing much more fun.

The long and short of this story is that when you set up a drupal powered website on your computer at home you can try to use the built in e-mail systems, but nothing will happen. The reason is that your home server most likely doesn't have email subsystems installed, and even if it did your ISP no doubt blocks outgoing e-mail ports to prevent spam from being sent by home users.

The work around: the phpmailer module http://drupal.org/project/phpmailer

Just download and unpack the module (or drush dl phpmailer)

and then go to: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer/files/phpmailer%20for%20php5_6/

download the PHPMailer v5.1 package and get the "phpmailer" folder and place it in your sites\all\modules\phpmailer directory.. yes it will look like sites\all\modules\phpmailer\phpmailer which is normal.

Now you can enable the module (drush en phpmailer) and configure it at Administer > Site Configuration > PHP Mailer

The simplest option at this point is to create a gmail account for your websites e-mail and just use that. These are the details as described in the phpmailer module documentation:

SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com
SMTP port: 465
Secure protocol: SSL
Username: your_google_mail_name@gmail.com
Password: your_google_mail_password

using any other e-mail provider will require knowing the connection specific details.