With the next Barcamp Bangalore looming round the corner, I’d pitched in to help with some of the website tasks. I installed the traditional WAMP stack with WAMP Server for Windows and started working with WordPress. Needed to get the email notifications working, saw that it wasn’t. Bit of research & found that I’d need a SMTP server or an equivalent of sendmail.
All the cool kids seem to be using Fake sendmail - I tried it to use with Gmail’s SMTP servers which uses authentication & TLS. Fake sendmail either would crash repeatedly or give a Socket Error # 10060 Connection timed out error.
Finally, after much trawling the Intarwebz, going through many forums & Stack Overflow posts, finally found this blog post which recommends using stunnel.
So this is what my php.ini settings look like:
[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
; https://php.net/smtp
;SMTP = localhost
; https://php.net/smtp-port
;smtp_port = 25
; For Win32 only.
; https://php.net/sendmail-from
sendmail_from = <the gmail id>
;C:\wamp\bin\sendmail
; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
; https://php.net/sendmail-path
sendmail_path = "C:\wamp\bin\sendmail\sendmail.exe -t"
Yes, all parameters, except for sendmail_form & sendmail_path are commented. They are set in sendmail.ini & stunnel.
sendmail.ini:
smtp_server=localhost
smtp_port=25
; SMTPS (SSL) support
; auto = use SSL for port 465, otherwise try to use TLS
; ssl = alway use SSL
; tls = always use TLS
; none = never try to use SSL
smtp_ssl=none
auth_username=gmail username
auth_password=gmail password
stunnel.conf
; Certificate/key is needed in server mode and optional in client mode
cert = stunnel.pem
socket = l:TCP_NODELAY=1
socket = r:TCP_NODELAY=1
key = stunnel.pem
[ssmtp]
accept = 465
connect = 25
[gmail-smtp]
client = yes
accept = 127.0.0.1:25
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465
