Problem

You want to use one of Movable Type's outbound email features and need to configure them.

Solution

Use the MailTransfer directive along with either the SendMailPath or SMTPServer directives based on your server's environment.

Discussion

Movable Type makes smart enough choices for default mail configuration settings that in many cases you will not be required to change anything.

Without any changes to the configuration, MT uses sendmail for outbound email services. By default it will look for sendmail in three standard locations: /usr/lib/sendmail, /usr/sbin/sendmail, and /usr/ucblib/sendmail. If sendmail is not in one of these locations on your system, you can specify it in the system configuration with the SendMailPath directive.

To switch to SMTP instead of sendmail, set the MailTransfer directive in mt-config.cgi to 'smtp'. (By default MailTransfer is set to 'sendmail'.) Using the SMTP option will require the Mail::Sendmail module from CPAN. You will also need to add the SMTPServer with the address of your SMTP server unless it is being hosted locally.

For development purposes, MailTransfer supports a third option, 'debug,' that will print outbound email to STDERR.

When MT sends a notification message it will, by default, use the author's email address as the sender and the receiver. This will cause some spam filters to reject these messages. Setting the EmailAddressMain directive in the system configuration with a valid email address will cause MT to send notifications using this address instead. While optional, this is highly recommended.

With our outbound email services configured, we can now put the email scripts included in MT to work.