Step 1: Is your system able to send email?
If you are on a unix variant you can check this quickly by doing the following from the command line prompt:
$ mail mailto:me@mymailserver.com
Subject: Is my server set up to send email?
I will know if I can read this form my inbox
.
That "." on the last line tells mail you're done with the message. Check your inbox. If you have a message from yourself proceed to step 2. If not check your mail log: might be in /var/log/maillog, or /var/log/mail.err, or /var/log/mail.info, or just /var/log/mail. If it says it was sent without any errors you might need to talk with mail admins elsewhere. If there are erros, google is your friend (please post your solution here for others).
Step 2: Is OpenACS correctly configured to send email?
Check your config.tcl file (usually: /var/lib/aolserver/service0/etc/config.tcl ?) and look for the MailHost parameter. If it is set, it should be set to the IP of a mailserver (your own?) or localhost (assuming the MTA is running locally). If that looks good, do something to trigger an email in OpenACS. You can tail -f your mail log to see what happens and if you do not see anything there check your OpenACS error.log (/var/lib/aolserver/service0/error.log) and see if those messages help (post errors here if you can not figure it out).
Step 3: Celebrate and "buy Dave a beer" http://www.thedesignexperience.org/ (see the text and Paypal link), because he (and Don) pushed OpenACS 5.2 out the door , which was a tight squeeze for two people to deal with (Don already has a Powerbook and doesn't have a paypal link)
