Nate's Programming Blog

I think I finally have my server back to the point it was at when I was in Springfield. The last piece that I needed to setup was the smtp server. It took me most the night, but I think I have it up and functioning. I’m using an smtp server from a company called ArGoSoft. I basically chose it because it was free and all the user and editorial reviews I read seemed pretty positive. It is geared more to the home and small office users, so I figured it would have what I needed and be fairly simple to install and setup.

Well the installer was pretty bare bones, but it works. This particular smtp server comes with a built in Web Server for accessing email over the internet. Of course this had problems out of the box since I’m running Apache, but I was able to go into the admin console and change the port fairly easily. One of the downsides with the Web Interface is that all the code is locked up in the exe file or dlls, so I am unable to just have Apache point to the directory and run it from there. I’m not having a lot of success with the Web Interface anyway, because it seems to want to log me out everytime I click on a link, therefore I can see email messages that are sent to me, but I can’t compose or read them, not very useful.

I was able to set up my new email account in outlook express pretty quickly though, just needed some firewall settings changed. The main thing that gave me problems was getting PHP code to be able to send emails. Everything seemed setup correctly in my php.ini file, but it still was having problems connecting. After a couple of hours of research I finally found the problem. You have to register their ActiveX library so that other applications can have access to it. Once I figured that out I was able to send and receive some test emails from a small php script I wrote.