Contacts Page How To Use Email php for email

Hi

My name is Camzio and I am just about to go into my last year at Uni. I hope I have posted this in the correct forum? I apologize if I am in the wrong area!

I have recently been working on a website for a friend which is almost finished, its nothing fancy as I am still learning and I hope to enhance it once I have finished my degree.
One of my problems at the moment, after reading so many books and looking through the internet is, I am getting confused about how I actually need to set up email for them. We have found a hosting company, and have domain and email address but, before I start to put the finishing touches I want to do a dummy run of placing a php script inside the "contact page" so I can see it working correctly, which is why I have been recommended by a colleague to use Xampp.

I guess what I am asking you is could you please advice me how I go about doing this:
1/ Should I include the php within the contact page and if so how do I test this? is it through mercury? Or
2/ Should I maybe set up a new page where I could use the include function for headers etc, I'm completely lost and not sure how to start this. I originally tried this through another freeware site but it kept telling me the SMTP was not set up and I don't have enough time now to go to my ISP to see if it is possible for them to allow me to use there port, in fact they probably wouldn't allow me or its just not done like that.

Would appreciate any feedback you have! And thank you very much for reading.

Camzio

Have you tried running the test script on the hosting server?In xampp, you need to set up mercury for it to work, im not sure though. Just try running a sample mail script on the live server and if it works its good to go.