There’ve been lots of times when I wanted to use the mail() function on my local server. I am sure lots of you would’ve been wanting it too but most of you would’ve settled for PHPMailer or just used a web host to test the code instead. I myself had been doing the same until recently when I finally decided to do some research and get it to work.

Here are the steps in short for the geeks who like to do things on their own:
All I did was used smtp client called msmtp, configured it to work with my gmail account and configured PHP to use msmtp to send emails.

This tutorial is only applicable for linux users. I’ll write another article for windows users soon when I get my hands on a windows box.
All the commands used in the instructions are for Ubuntu, however you may use corresponding commands for your distro (for eg; you can use yum install instead of apt-get install on fedora, redhat, centos.

Step by step instructions:

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My host recently started allowing remote connections to its mysql database. It was a really useful feature – I could not change database settings from my own computer. Since it started allowing remote connections from my IP, I could use any mysql client to connect to it. I fired up terminal and tried to connect using the command:

mysql --host=69.89.31.242 --user=username --password=password

It connected. This was just to test the connection. I wanted to connect my phpmyadmin with this remote host. For that I edited /etc/phpmyadmin/config-db.php file and changed:

$dbserver=”;

to

$dbserver=’69.89.31.242′;

I loaded the url http://localhost/phpmyadmin, entered the database username and password and I got in. I could administer my database from my local phpmyadmin installation.

Cheers!