This Wednesday night (Aug. 6), the Sierra Adobe User Group is going to be having a preview of the next version of Dreamweaver, presented by yours truly.
The meeting is scheduled to start at 6:30 PM Pacific time. We will be broadcasting the meeting online, so everyone anywhere is welcome to join us. You can get details, RSVP, and find a link to the online meeting room at our website, www.sierrammug.org.
Hope to see everyone there!
If you do any sort of web development, you are likely going to run into situations where you need to have your web application send email. While the process of setting up your server-side script to send the email isn't difficult, testing it can be. In the past, I have always simply uploaded the script(s) to my web host and tested it live. While that worked fine for my development projects (although it was always a hassle), it didn't work so well in classes.
I finally decided that the topic was important enough to do a little research and see if there was a way that I could set something up on a local machine to test sending email, and it turns out that it was almost ridiculously simple. A quick Google search for "free SMTP program" brought up a bunch of results; I'll be using a program called, strangely enough, Free SMTP Server. I think it was the first or second hit on Google, but I found something that worked for what I needed so I didn't bother investigating any further.
Once you have the program downloaded and installed, you're pretty much done. Go into the configuration settings for your language of choice. If you use ColdFusion, open up the ColdFusion Administrator and go to the Mail page. If you're a PHP person, open up php.ini. Either way, simply make sure that the mail server is set to "localhost" and the port is 25.
That's it. (Well, if you use PHP, you need to restart your web server.) For ColdFusion, simply create a cfmail tag:
In PHP, it'll be as easy:
Note that while this is a great solution, it only sends the email - it doesn't receive it. That's because SMTP is only for sending mail. Receiving it requires an POP server, and that's a whole different ballgame. However, as long as you use a real, valid email account in the "to" field, you should be able to test this with no problems.
This is pretty cool: a phenomenal piece of the history of the web. On February 25, 1993, Marc Andreesen, then still merely a part of the software development group at the National Center for Superconducting Applications, posted this message on the WWW-talk chat group proposing a "new optional HTML tag: IMG". Yup, here it is - the introduction of that which would truly set the web apart from Gopher and the other applications of the internet.
(Oh, and can I just say that I was also shocked when I looked up Andreesen on Wikipedia for the link above and discovered that he's only just over two months older than me?)
