XAMPP comes with MercuryMail. To use it for sending test mails, you can do the followings:

1. Start Mercury Mail from XAMPP control panel.
2. Navigate to Mercury Mail folder in XAMPP installation (Most probably C:\Program Files\xampp\MercuryMail)
3. Double click on mercury.exe and Mercury window will be opened.
4. Go to Configuration -> Local Users
5. Add a user with password (Suppose sajjad)
6. Close this window.

That’s it.

Now you can send mail to sajjad@localhost or sajjad@localhost.com (Mecury Mail should be started).

To receive mail configure outlook express with localhost as pop3 and SMTP server.

Hope these information will be helpful.

When I started coding in PHP, the main hassle was preparing the development environment. Installing Apache, PHP, MySQL was not so easy. Then I came across PHPTried and after that WAMPP. But finally I got what I wanted - XAMPP. To me XAMPP is a total PHP development environment.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

To get a copy of XAMPP, visit http://www.apachefriends.org/.