Improvement suggestions for mail() delivery problems

Hello, This is probably not quite a problem of quality assurance but rather of helping users to configure PHP to work as they need. Lately more than before I have been observing an increasing number of users that are having an hard time configuring PHP to delivery their messages through the mail() function. Usually I recommend them classes that I wrote to deliver messages using directly SMTP/sendmail/qmail and usually it works. It turns out that often PHP configuration needs to be tweaked so they could do it with the mail() function. The problem is that the users have no way of knowing what to do because the mail() function hardly produces useful feedback. So, there are a few suggestions that I would like to make so people can help themselves instead of clutering the mailing lists with help requests. - I don't use Windows myself but many complains come from Windows users. They say that when mail() fails it just throws a "Server error" or something vague like that. So, one improvement suggestion is would be to put out more explicit error messages, stating the server address that was tried to connect or the SMTP error message that was returned. - Sometimes the problems are silent. No error returns but the messages do not get delivered. It would be nice if there was an optional mail sending log stating if the delivery was sucessful and, if not, stating the returned error conditions. This could be an option disabled by default that would let the users specify a mail delivery log file that would be availabled regardless of the platform. - Some Unix/Linux users complain of unknown delivery problems too. sendmail itself does not provide much helpful feedback. A SMTP based delivery alternative solution would provide more feedback despite it usually is slower for queueing messages to be delivers to many users. Still I think that it would be very helpful if under Unix/Linux systems, a SMTP based develivery option would be available. This way, at least the users can see better why mail delivery is failing instead of remaining helpless. I don't have time to implement this myself, but I would be willing to share my experience to help any volunteers to improve the mail delivery problems and reduce the user frustration when using PHP to send out their messages. Opinions/Volunteers? Regards, Manuel Lemos