I'm completley new to zencart but i've still managed to set it up localy on my pc to play around with it. Everything seems to work fine except anything to do with e-mail.

My question is : Should the e-mail features work (or does the site have to be "live") If it should work, what kind of settings should I be using to be able to send and recieve e-mail ?
At the moment I can e.g. "send" an e-mail to a customer (i.e. a test customer i've set up) or request a new password for example and all seems to work with messages such as "message sent to someone@somewhere" (Obviously, in the real message the correct adress is shown)and "your new password has been sent to your adress" etc etc. But no e-mails ever actually arrive.

Apologies if i've missed something very basic here but as I said, very new to the whole thing
Many thanks