help setting up Mercury with Apache

[chiprivers]

I am not very good at all this server admin stuff, I only set up Apache so that I could learn PHP and test on my machine without paying for web hosting.

At the moment, I am trying to learn to integrate email into my scripting using the mail() function but it would appear that first I need to set up the server to handle mail.  I obtained Apache by downloading BigApache from www.bigapache.org and I believe that it has been installed with the standard set up of PHP, MySQL and Mercury.

The first couple of times a tried to send an email using the mail(), it failed.  After a started Mercury by clicking on:

Start>All Programmes>Big Apache>Mercury>Mercury Start

I ran the simple mail script again and I believe that the mail was accepted (the mail() function returned TRUE) but no email seemed to be sent / recieved.

Could anybody please advise me if there is something I need to amend in the configuration of either Mercury, Apache or PHP?  Please be gentle, as I said, I am not very good with server admin!