How to set up an email account with Oscommerce

[curiocor]

I hope someone can help as this is driving me crazy!

I have recently set up oscommerce using the automatic installer in cpanel on a free hosting account as I want to try out the software. Everything seems to work ok except for email, which I can not get to work no matter how hard I try. Ideally I would like to set up smtp to work with a gmail account, but getting things to work with an x10 email would also be ok. How do I set up an associated email so that the sendmail option in oscommerce works? Oscommerse is in a subdirectory on my site curiocorner.elementfx.com/shop

Also how would I set up SMTP to work with a gmail address? I have been told something called php auth may be the answer, but after downloading and installing it as instructed oscommerce now has the extra email username and password fields to fill in, but when I test it by sending an email from contact us on the site, all it does is say waiting for elementfx.com, then the screen goes blank with a bit of script in the address bar of the browser ending in =SEND.

I have also tried Presta Shop, but this stalls at the same point and returns a time out error.

Some oscommerce experts I have contacted said it might be something being blocked by my host. As I'm currently on a free account I was wondering if that was the case.

Obviously I want to get this working before considering commiting to a paid hosting plan.

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[VincentYbarra]

Hi curiocor,
May I ask why you would want to setup SMTP with oscommerce, make life easier and use your x10 domain.
Setting up SMTP with OSC can be a little fun.

 

[essellar]

External SMTP is not allowed on Free Hosting accounts; all outgoing mail needs to go through x10Hosting's outbound spam/phishing filters. Unfortunately, since gratis is an equivalent statement to no real cost for failing and "identification" and "accountability" are completely covered by providing an email address at sign-up, there tends to be a statistically significant number of people who will try to do the sorts of things that get the x10Hosting servers added to blacklists, etc. Before external SMTP was disallowed/disabled, that was a regular occurrence (not being blocked was the exceptional condition); these days the mail problems are mostly about sheer volume.

 

[curiocor]

Oh well... I had a feeling it was x10 blocking me from setting up external smtp. It would be good if they made that clear though, instead of letting me take the time and effort to install software I can't use! What's the point of that?

I'm glad I didn't sign up for a paid account. I shall now be taking my business elsewhere.

 

[leafypiggy]

You can use the software, you just cannot use an external SMTP server. We see so much spam originating from our servers, that if we didn't filter it, no mail would ever be able to be sent. All outgoing mail on free (and premium, with a few exceptions) must go through our outbound scanning filter.