Basic configuration of osCommerce, concluded - Email Options
(Page 2 of 5 )
Try this! Go to the last option in the administration tool, entitled Tools, click on the Send Email option, and send an email to Janet Doe, or whoever your current customer is. Ensure before doing this that the customer you are sending the email to has an email address that you can receive because you are going to test whether or not osCommerce is able to send emails with its default configuration. If not, you will need to go back to the Customers option and edit the email address for the customer appropriately.
Once you have sent the email, hang around for a bit to see if you receive it in good order. If so, then you can pretty much leave the email settings as they are for the time being. The only thing you need concern yourself with at deployment time is whether your site will be hosted on a Linux server (very likely) or a Windows server. If it's Linux, then all you need do is test your email configuration on the live site as is; if it's Windows, you will probably need to change the first two settings—E-mail Transport Method and E-mail Linefeeds—to their alternate settings.
The Use MIME HTML when sending Emails option should be left as false for the moment. Obviously at a later stage you might decide you would like to spruce up your emails with some HTML, but for the moment there is no need. Remember, however, that not all mail-client applications support HTML, so you might be marginalizing some customers by using this. The good news is that as time goes by, more and more people will be able to receive MIME format emails—as opposed to the just the majority for the moment.
You might decide that you want to check whether your customers are supplying you with email addresses that actually exist. If this is the case, then you should set the Verify E-mail Addresses Through DNS setting to true. osCommerce will then check with the relevant domain server to ensure that the given email address exists on that server and so will be able to receive the email that you are attempting to send.
You can also disable email sending entirely if you wish. For the moment this is not necessary, because at some stage we will need to test certain things relating to emails—for example, whether osCommerce is sending confirmation of order emails, and so on. It is entirely likely that you will be developing osCommerce with live data further down the line; in other words, data that reflects real live customer's details. In this case, it is unlikely that we would want them to receive erroneous emails as the result of our testing, so we simply set the Send E-Mails option to false.
If your initial attempt at sending an email didn't pay off, then try swapping the Email Transport Method setting and resending. If this fails, then I am afraid it is time for you to put the osCommerce community to good use—think of any problems like this as a chance to learn how to use the osCommerce community resource.
Next: Download >>
More Web Authoring Articles
More By PACKT Publishing
|
 This article is excerpted from Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition, written by David Mercer (PACKT, 2005; ISBN: 1904811140). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
|
|
/ 5 
