One common problem whilst developing is that you don't want to send emails out to the client (or their clients!). Ideally, we want to alter our development environment so that this doesn't happen, but still allows us to test the contents of emails that are sent by our web applications.
Windows
On Windows, the mail() function uses SMTP over port 25. Unless you've changed your php.ini file, then it will try to connect to localhost in order to send an email. On Windows VM, I use Fakemail. This is an SMTP mail server written in perl (or python) that store emails as files into a given directory. When your web application sends an email, you check in the directory and look at the files created. One top tip: alter the script to give each file a .txt extension. Then you can double click :)
Fakemail is also very useful in Linux/Mac if you are using the SMTP transport mail in Zend_Mail or Swiftmailer or whatever.
Linux / OS X
On the *nix based systems, mail() sends email using an application on the system called sendmail (or any number of compatible alternatives). By default it will call the sendmail binary, however you can change this in your php.ini with the sendmail_path setting.
I set my development boxes like this:
sendmail_path = /usr/local/bin/trapmail
Now, mail() will call my trapmail script. This script is trivial:
formail -R cc X-original-cc \ -R to X-original-to \ -R bcc X-original-bcc \ -f -A"To: rob@akrabat.com" \ | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i
This script causes all emails to be redirect to my email address with the original to, cc and bcc fields renamed in the headers, so they can be checked!. I like this solution even better than Fakemail as it's easier to see exactly what the mail looks like in a mail client, especially for HTML format.
I just wish I had thought of this script myself! However Sean Coates came up with the idea in 2005 and I've been using it every since.
