Well, that's what I was trying to say: I don't think it's my PHP code because it used to work on a newer version of Mercury and now, when I downgraded, it doesn't anymore.

However, when I think about it, I also downgraded PHP, so I will have to see exactly what causes the problem. Although now I tend to think it's PHP who formats the addresses incorrectly.

Will test this tomorrow and let you know.

Thanks again for your help

Hello everyone,

I am a PHP developer that is trying to test some functionality that involves sending emails locally. I have installed XAMPP 1.7.0 on Windows XP with the default settings of Mercury. I then realized that I PHP 5.2.8 invalidates email addresses that end up with @localhost, so I decided to use @localhost.domain.

I added in localhost.domain in my Windows hosts file and also in Mercury under: Core Module Configuration (Internet name of this system and Local domains) and SMTP Server (Announce myself as).

Then I used the PHP mail function to send an email from tudor@localhost.domain to support@localhost.domain. The email is sent, but there is a problem and all I get is a "Delivery failure" message back in tudor's Inbox, instead of the actual message in support's Inbox.

The error message is: "User support@localhost.domain not known at this site".

A screenshot of my Mercury Admin window can be found at: http://www.flashxml.net/bogdan/mercury.png 

Of course I will be more than glad to provide any other kind of information that you might need.

The format of the 'rcpt to' command is wrong.  It should have a single pair of '<>' brackets containing just the email address.

OMG your are right. Thanks a lot. I am using PHPMailer as my emailing library in my PHP application and it supports the addition of names along with email addresses in the To and From headers of emails. As soon as I removed the name, the emails got through.

Now my other problem is that this problem is triggered by downgrading my Mercury installation.

Like I said in my previous post, I am using XAMPP. Before, when I didn't have this problem, I was using version 1.7.2, which I (think) has Mercury 4.62.

I decided to downgrade XAMPP to 1.7.0, because it has PHP 5.2.8. Now I am stuck with Mercury 4.52 which has this annoying angle brackets issue.

Does anyone know how to ugrade my Mercury installation in XAMPP?

Yes. Just download the latest installer, run it, and choose 'upgrade' when asked.

You will still need to fix your PHP script so that it generates valid mail headers though.