An error occurred while sending mail. We do not relay non-local mail. -- XAMPP

I have successfully installed XAMPP as directed in the Zen Cart manual. Mercury Mail is working and sending messages too.

I installed Thunderbird and set up the email accounts as directed in the manual on pages 42-44. I tried sending an email message from [email protected] to [email protected]. It doesn't work. I get this error message:
"An error occurred while sending mail. We do not relay non-local mail. Sorry. Please check the message recipients and try again."

The outgoing mail server for all the email account properties says:
storekeeper - mail.example.com (Default)

I run Microsoft Vista on this computer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Try with storekeeper@localhost and nicole@localhost and see what happens.

I sent a message from [email protected] to nicole@localhost and it worked.

Tried sending a message from [email protected] to [email protected] and it did not work-gave me the same error message above.

Sending a message from [email protected] to storekeeper@localhost does work.

I am unable to send the test email from the admin console, as directed in the Zen Cart manual on page 74. When I send the message I get this error message:

Email Error: SMTP Error: The following recipients failed: [email protected]

Please advise as to how to fix this.

Are you trying to specifically add "localhost mailserver configuration" skills to your resume?

If not, forget about it and move on to the rest of setting up your store. Then test the mail functions using a real live webserver which is already designed to work with sending email ... and let the folks who do server administration for a living be the ones to make sure their mailserver functions are working properly.

Your localhost computer wasn't designed to be a mailserver. It seems you're spending a lot of time trying to make it do that for no beneficial reason ... ie: your store isn't going to run from your localhost computer when you "go live" anyway, so why waste time on something of no value?

That's my opinion, anyway. Not meant to be rude or critical ... just an observation, along with recommendation on how to reduce stress and focus on tangible results.

DrByte,

I appreciate the advice, and in fact moving on is exactly what I decided to do last night. Learning about Zen Cart with this manual is great, except for the hassles with the email functionality problems.

Thanks.

I have had the exact same problem with Apache. After I installed Apache, I did the email test using localhost. It worked ok. But when I used example.com as page 39 suggested, it would not work. I could use example.com in one and localhost in the other and it would work but not with example.com in both. I worked with this for many hours and even did a uninstall/install. I then installed Mercury mail. Of course the problem was still there and no email could be sent because of the example.com domain. Also, I did check for typing errors on the config changes. ok.
Has anyone found a fix for this.
Thank You for any help.

Your problem seems to be related to how your Windows hosts file is set up or how DNS is resolved on your system. If you're unsure what I mean by that, you can follow these few steps instead.

First, check whether you are using the same XAMPP version as that recommended in the book. Otherwise, you will need to make some other manual tweaks to your Mercury settings. XAMPP versions using PHP 5.3 will not work with Zen Cart 1.3.8a altogether.

Second, make sure you update your book's contents with the errata and updates which we have posted on our site. We have not made any updates for Windows 7 and its different editions though.

Finally, if it takes too much time to set up the Mercury email on your local PC, you can skip that section and set up your email on your live server when you have settled on a host.