I have to agree with you Zet Man.

I was not expecting ossn to do anything for me. All I was trying to do was get input from you young people that know more about this than I ever will.

I enjoy this program a lot it is very well written and designed.

You do not need to worry...I am down at the moment due to while redoing the server my windows server 2003 disk became corrupted so I am in the process of getting a new one.

I will continue to use ossn and see where and how it develops...But I will no longer ask for advice because it seems to upset some of the staff.

A much different approach would be to spread the insight that you simply can't expect to get everything for free. There are thousands of reliable hosting providers offering a seamlessly working PHP/SQL/MAIL environtment for less than 5 bucks a month - it can't be the business of OSSN to support exotic home brewed solutions.

@I think in V3.x we should provide to add custom mail server settings.

LOL...Well tomorrow when I get up I have to copy all of my files to my other server and wipe my social server out and start from scratch...I tried all day to get a mail server going with iis and just couldn't do it and in the process screwed the machines configuration up a little so WIPE OUT TIME.

I can't see any relation to xammp. xammp is offering a web server and a mysql server - no smtp server. The smtp server is part of your windows. So the first step is to follow the advices in the knowledgebase article to set up a working smtp service listening on port 25.

Php's mail function does nothing except trying to connect to this port and delivering the mail when the connection is established. But you don't have to spend a thought on that as long as smtp itself is denying to send anything to the outer world.

Thank you Zet Man for the information but I am running the server with xampp...instead of IIS that comes with windows server 2003...I have found even though you can run a php server with IIS it is more designed to run an exe type server. The configuration just to run a php website involves to many extra extensions.

this might be helpful, too:
http://www.ruhanirabin.com/php-sendmail-setup-with-smtp-iis-and-windows-servers/

To isolate the problem, I'd suggest to start from the very beginning:
1. Follow the steps as described in http://support.microsoft.com/de-de/kb/323350/en-us
2. If you're not able to send mails this way manually, there's a good chance your problem is caused by your home hosted site because today many providers deny to receive mails from this range of Ips.
3. If you are, my next step would be to run a known working email client like thunderbird to connect to your smpt server and make use of it.
4. If this is working, but php still not, it's time to check your servers php configuration.

good luck.

No I am going to stay with windows. I have been dealing with microsoft ever since the good old days of msdos 1.0 all the way thourgh to msdos 6.2 and windows 3.0 to windows 3.11 for work groups.

It is just for some reason when it comes to setting up a mail server for a website I just can not figure out how to configure it and I would like to use the invite function in the website.

@Steve,

Your server seems to be perfect, if you are thinking of installing linux then install centos and after installing centos ,
install http://webuzo.com/wiki/Install webuzo is a good panel, you don't need to configure anything, you can install/configure mail server on one click.