# Setting up XAMPP for email feature development ### Overview: - XAMPP contains a package called Mercury which allows you to set up a local SMTP server which can relay messages to external servers such as Gmail. This is useful if you want to test the mailing features of moodle on your local machine. ### What you need: - XAMPP which can be found [here](http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html "http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html") - Details for your SMTP server. I used Gmail which has information posted here: - [http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13287](http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13287) ### Configuring Mercury: - Trying to configure Mercury takes 27 or more steps which can be extremely confusing without a guide. I found [this guide](http://www.danieltmurphy.com/setting-up-mercury-smtp/ "this guide") to be very helpful. - In addition to what the guide says you must add the line “sendmail\_from = postmaster@localhost” to both ‘xampp/php/php.ini’ and ‘xampp/apache/bin/php.ini’ before restarting apache and mercury from the xampp control panel. - If you’re successful, you should be able to use PHP’s mail function without error. ### Configuring Moodle: - In order to use Moodle’s email functionality, we need to configure the settings under the Administration Panel → Server → Email. - Set SMTP hosts: localhost - Leave SMTP username and SMTP password blank.