Hello. I am new to SMTP and not sure exactly how it works. Basically, I have a Win2003 box running Apache. It hosts a community website I made for my school (www.iit.edu) and they have provided a subdomain as our address (xxxxxx.iit.edu) I have made a contact form, but when i give submit, it gives the warning [code]Failed to connect to mailserver at "students.iit.edu" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" [/code]. I want the details from the users to me mailed to my IIT email account. according to IIT, our smtp address is students.iit.edu.i have no idea why it was not working. then I did a search in php freaks before i started this thread. i found this [url=http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,99143.0.html]http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,99143.0.html[/url] post, i got an idea of whats going on but couldnt fix the problem. I also went ahead and installed a SMTP server (do i need that?). I ran the same contact form home from my laptop(localhost) using my ISP's SMTP address and it worked. But I am unable to run the form from the server. I know I have a router thats forwarding all the requests to my server. Does it play a role in the SMTP settings?. Can anyone give me an idea which address so i have to put exactly in the SMTP field of the php.ini file?. I am way confused. And how would i configure the SMTP server if i needed it. Would really appreciate any reply so that I can try out something. Thanks in advance!