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Email displays on screen but is not sent

Item: #68
Date: 6 Nov 2001
Applies to
v4
v5

Question

I cant seem to get the shop to send emails to anywhere but the screen. No mail is sent, and I see a text area on the screen with the text of the email in it. What's up?

Answer

CactuShop supports a number of third party email components as well as Microsoft standard methods for sending email from an ASP page. You can change the method by editing the 'emailmethod' config setting.

There is also a test mode, 'write'. This is set as default when we ship CactuShop. This method doesn't send email but instead writes the contents of the email to the screen in a text area. This is useful during testing - you can see what email would be sent without having to wait for an email to pass through the email system. It is also useful for debugging problems as you can see what addresses CactuShop is using for the 'from' and 'to' fields even if the mail is not being sent or received (a problem that *may* be related to either of the email addresses).

To switch the site to actually send email, you first need to find out from your web host which methods of sending mail are supported on your server. CactuShop supports the following options:

'aspmail' (serverobjects.com)
'persits' or 'aspemail' (persits.com)
'jmail' (dimac.net)
'cdonts' or 'cdo' (Windows 2000 Server standard)
'cdosys'* (Windows Server 2003 standard)

* supported by CactuShop v5.1 onwards

Components for the first three can be downloaded at the respective companies' web sites (given in parenthesis). There may be a charge for the full version of these components. These are third party products and Cactusoft takes no responsibility for technical support of the installation and configuration of them. Before contacting Cactusoft about mail problems using any of these methods, please verify the operation using the sample scripts supplied by the respective vendors. We will not look at mail problems with CactuShop sites until the operation of the installed mail method has been verified using a vendor-supplied test script.

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