the team behind php mail function-behind the scenes

[silursh]

I tried real hard to practice that elusive php mail function but i couldn't manage to successfully send email from my php form to any of the mailbox addresses that i specified as recipient in my php form. It has been three days and i am still clueless. So all that can really help me now is a clear understanding of what actually happens when we trigger the mail function right from our form through the smtp server to the target mailbox.I am using xampp with mercury mail.

[pritaeas]

When you invoke the mail() function, it tries to connect to the smtp server, as specified in the php.ini

I don't know where you are trying to connect to, but not all mail servers allow this. If you are trying to connect to localhost, then you need a local smtp server, which I doubt is installed.