XAMPP installation: mailoutput folder: info & docs about PHPMailer sought

emailxampp

I am running XAMPP on a local installation of Windows 7.
I have not been running XAMPP's Mercury server because I've tried it
once in the past and could not get it to work. So I thought
I did not have SMTP working on my machine, until yesterday
I installed a localized version of WordPress and then
found the following folder:

C:\Users\JSonderson\Desktop\mailoutput\

containing a message named:

mail-20131024-1946-826000.txt

containing the following message:

To: admin@rainbow.com
Subject: Nuovo sito WordPress
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 19:46:05 +0000
Return-Path: wordpress@127.0.0.1
From: WordPress <wordpress@127.0.0.1>
Message-ID: <64abe75651ddef4a4b0c4351bb927d21@127.0.0.1>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.2.4 (http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/phpmailer/)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

[snip]

I've looked at the URL http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/phpmailer/
for PHPMailer but could not find out about it and it does not seem to be
documented on the page http:// localhost/xampp where it is not listed
under "Components" and could not see it with phpinfo();

Could someone please explain to me how to find out more about how PHPMailer
is configured to work with my XAMPP installation and how to send mail (so
that it presumably shows up on my desktop's mailutput folder).
How do I configure e-mail accounts with PHPMailer?

Thanks.

Best Answer

PHPMailer, assuming we are talking about the same program, is not part of XAMPP (although I am not familiar enough to know if it's incl with WordPress, but I doubt it).

To install PHPMailer, you upload a few files to a folder on your web server (or in the document root, which in XAMPP is the htdocs folder). These files are important:

  • class.phpmailer.php --> Necessary
  • class.pop3.php --> Optional
  • class.smtp.php --> Optional
  • PHPMailerAutoload.php --> Useful

To load PHPMailer, you need a line like:

<?php
    require("class.phpmailer.php");

or

<?php
    require("PHPMailerAutoload.php");

You don't create email accounts in PHPMailer; you create them on your webserver (or other mail host, like google mail). Then you provide the email account login/password to PHPMailer in its instructions.

Here are some docs and tutorials for PHPMailer:

Tutorial from Apache

Installation Docs

Helpful Answer on SO <-- Also note the (accepted) answer immediately above this one

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