Configuring mail settings in a development environment

We will proceed to user and group management shortly. But first, let us address an important concern—how to configure the mail settings when your site is in development.

If you browse to http://localhost:8080/Plone and click on Site Setup on your newly-created Plone site, you should see:

This warning message was designed to encourage folks to configure their mail settings now, rather than waiting for an error message to appear later, in case they failed to do so.

However, the need for the warning message mostly applies only to production sites. In development, you may not be running a mail server locally (that is, on your laptop), or you may not have access to the production mail servers, a mail server you can test with, and so on.

Having to configure the mail settings in production is expected, but having to configure them in development can be a mild annoyance. Nevertheless, having the mail server working in development is often quite...