Setup A Free Mail Transport System on Windows

If you do not have a web hosting account yet and you wish to test various email-related scripts, such as contact forms, webmail, autoresponders and more, you can setup a free mail server on your home computer. This alternative will give you more freedom to understand the mechanism of email transport across the internet.

Mercury Mail Transport System is a mail processing tool which is available on many operating systems. It is also integrated in XAMPP, which represents an Apache distribution. In order to be able to test your scripts, first you must configure Mercury application and then an email client.

This application provides you support for SMTP, POP3 (server and client), IMAP4 and more. From the main menu select Configuration - Manage local users. Add a new user specifying Username/Password : root/root. Then you must set the module's configuration. For SMTP client configuration at Name Servers the value is 127.0.0.1 and for POP3 Server, IP Interface to Use field has the same value.

In order to be able to read your email on localhost using a Windows based email client, then POP3 client protocol module must be configured. Select MercuryD POP3 Client then add a new POP3 Account Information: POP3 Host - 127.0.0.1, Username/Password: root/root. After performing these operations, you will have the minimal support to test email-related scripts.

Then, your favorite email client must be configured in order to read mail. For example, in Outlook Express create a new mail account. For the type of server select POP3, incoming / outgoing mail server name is 127.0.0.1 and User Name / Password - root / root. You can test the email processing system configuration validity by sending an email to yourself (your email address is root@localhost). You can also define other domain names for Mercury Mail Transport System by selecting the appropriate option (Mercury core module). When you will use this method to test your email-related scripts, you will gain a lot of time and you will troubleshoot their errors in a more elegant manner.