Should e-mail still work?

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

If this is on a local PC in your home, then you likely will never get those emails, unless you change a few settings to override the limitations of the environment you're using.

1. to send mail requires that a mailserver service is running somewhere that the webserver can access

2. Windows does not have a built-in mailserver service

3. Your internet provider probably blocks the standard port 25 outgoing mail traffic for everything except mail destined for their own mailserver.

4. You can alter the Admin->Configuration->Email Options settings to use "smtp" or "smtpauth" for Email Transport, and then set the various SMTP settings lower on that same screen. If you use your ISP's mailserver settings, then you can leave port 25 alone.

5. You could alternatively find and install a mailserver service on your windows pc ... but it's probably not worth the trouble.

Further email system troubleshooting can be read here:
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Troubleshoot_-_Email_Problems

Thanks for the info.
I tried using smtp (and smtpauth as I think my isp needs authentication for its smtp server) Even tried using settings from amother isp (used to be on dialup with) but still no joy.

Downloaded the e-mail archive reader/searcher and got it working. According to the info in the link you supplied if the e-mails appear in the archive then they have been passed on to the mail server from zencart, right?
I just can't where i'm going wrong with the details of the smtp server?
Any help appreciated

If you're attempting to access an email server other than your ISP, you may need to find out whether they "listen" on port 26 or another port other than the usual port 25.

Some combinations of settings will result in messages being treated as spam and being dumped before delivery. Again, some of these are explained in the document I referenced earlier.

Hi
Posting this in case it might save someone alot of heartache in the future!

Looking through some old posts I came accross the SMTP "fix" for 1.3.5.

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=45377#post257358

After applying this everthing seems to be working fine.
At least I now know an awful lot more about zencart and e-mail than I did a few days ago

That works ... or upgrading to v1.3.6 to get the benefit of the other bugfixes all implemented, including address-entry pages working smarter.

At the moment the thought of upgrading still brings me out in a cold sweat but i'll work through the tutorials/posts first and then give it a go.
Many thanks:smile: