Hi Ken,
Thanks for your reply.
I appreciate that it's getting a little off topic but thought it was somewhat relevant to the direction the discussion was heading.
I've previously posted a question about this and got no reply. I'm reluctant to do a duplicated post.
I've installed a Ubuntu LAMP and put Moodle on it.
To get email working I used MSMTP (which is just an email client), got that working with php by putting the msmtp info in apache's php.ini (sendmail_path=<MTA/Client or whatever the server is using>) then Moodle could send emails with no further configuration, presumably by calling php's mail function. The email client I used had it's own config file where I put in SMTP server address, username, password etc.
What I don't get is how Moodle can use the info in Site Administration>Plugins>Message Outputs>Email
(ie SMTP Host, Username etc)
to send emails.
My understanding is that php's mail function (http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php), which fairly obviously wraps whatever MTA or client is specified in sendmail_path in php.ini, does not provide arguments where these things can be specified when mail is called.
Am I wrong? Otherwise how can moodle use the mail configuration info to control how emails are sent? Does Moodle bypass php's mail and send emails some other way, maybe using environment variables?
I appreciate your help.
Thanks
Bruce
by bruce chambr.