note 95806 rejected from ref.mail by thiago

Note Submitter: giantangrysquid at yahoo dot com ---- What is up with PHP's sendmail_path directive? Several things do not make sense to me. 1) It explicitly says "for Unix only," yet a) I keep seeing tutorials that say to use this line for Windows, and b) the example file path wouldn't even make sense in Unix 2) I have two servers - one Xampp, one that I'm setting up piece-by-piece (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc). I thought that the XAMPP one used sendmail.exe, since it's installed and I configured it, but the sendmail_path directive is commented out, so how would it know to use sendmail.exe? 3) On my custom-built server, I tried sending an email from PHP, and it also sends (slowly) - even though sendmail is not installed. I thought that was odd, so on the XAMPP server, I tried commenting out some of the important lines in sendmail.ini, and it still sends - but again, slowly. Does PHP have mailing functionality built-in? If not, does it somehow pass the message to Windows to send? Why is that slower than using the sendmail program? What the heck is going on here?