title: Sending emails through SMTP and testing
body: <p>I've got a PHP app with an invitation system where users can invite other users to try the service. Internally we use google apps for our domain to send/receive emails (mydomain.com).</p>
  
  <p>1) My question is, can I send emails from my server with the from address being invite@mydomain.com? I am worried about the emails being blocked/ignored by the destination server. I am aware that it is possible to send the emails by configuring my php installation to use google smtp server, but there is a limit of 500 emails a day, which is not very scalable.</p>
  
  <p>I don't really know that much about sending emails and why/how they are blocked/considered spam. I'd appreciate any good advice/tips you can give me.</p>
  
  <p>2) What is a good way to test to see if the email portion of my app is working without installing it on my live server. Can I just setup an smtp server on my desktop and send mails this way? Can you recommend any other good ideas for testing. I'll basically be sending just a few emails to my personal webmail accounts to make sure that everything works.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,
  Bill</p>