Fri, 10 Oct 2014 14:04:00 +1100 mick <bareman@tpg.com.au>:
I suspect that php & drupal are working but I need something in the way of a mail server set up for them to work through.
Don't "suspect". Especially when you have little to no experience with server software it's paramount to check the logs. Even when at first you don't understand what's getting logged, it's important there are logfiles in the first place.
The Postfix was package was installed as a dependancy of something I installed but the help files seem to me to require a sound understanding of e-mail systems and their jargon which I don't have.
Right, don't treat email as some minor dependency; a proper mailserver setup takes its time, probably moreso than any wiki, CMS or other web thingie. The easiest route would probably mean to install a minimal MTA providing /usr/bin/sendmail, like 'msmtp-mta' or 'nullmailer', and to configure it to forward mails through some existing mail account of yours. You might need to tweak the envelope sender address of the generated mails on your server or test with several different mail accounts as some providers don't forward mails from external domains, but all that is still way simpler than hosting your own Postfix. But in case you also need/want to _receive_ emails ... well, then there's no way around to learn at least the basics of Postfix/SMTP/DNS/etc. --byte