CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

There seems to be a mixture of experts and those of us that may be struggling to get CiviMail to work.  Most of my progress has been when an expert / mentor has given a tip that may seem obvious to them, but I just didn't get.  However, once I figure the item out, sometimes, but not always, I can productively share the item with others.

I thought it would be useful for those of us that are in a shared hosting environment to share what we have learned and for mentors to share the info that is needed for a CiviMail installation.

One area that I've yet to complete, is to determine if CiviMail can actually run on my shared host or if the issue is that I just haven't set things up correctly. I know that things are discussed in the install docs, but a list of tests to complete before even attempting to install might be helpful.  Items that I've struggled through with lots of help from others in the forum:

(1) PHP5 - I'd actually never run a php5 program before installing CiviCRM.  With current versions, php5 seems to be required.  The test:
- create a file like test.php on the server and place <?php phpinfo(); ?> in the script file
- run the test.php and see what php version is listed on the top of the output - in my case it was PHP Version 4.4.7
- if php5 then fine otherwise rename the file to test.php5 and try again - in my case then PHP Version 5.1.6
So if php5 is available, but not the default then there are two options: rename the top CiviCRM script to .php5 (which I did not do, because afraid of calling urls may just say .php)  However, I did do this approach with the install and had to modify the template form action to be .php5  T

To get php5, I added a handler in the .htaccess file as a forum mentor suggested:
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1499.0.html

(2) innodb - never ran a script that cared before. As mentor suggested, from phpmyadmin, click on show mysql system variables and search for innodb - seems to be available "Yes" , in my case

(3) Ability to send access smtp to send out mailings.  Apparently this uses a pear routine.  This is where I'm at now.  I have not been able to successfully send out emails, so I'm taking a look at whether I can send mail using smtp from my host and looking for a test script.  Found something - will report back.
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http://email.about.com/od/emailprogrammingtips/qt/et073006.htm
SMTP mail sending and pear seems to be available on my server, mail was sent nicely once I filled out all the parameters correctly.  My test worked with php 4 and php5, but using php5 for CiviMail.  Apparently SMTP access is not stopping my mail.  SMTP was easy to use in my test and similar to sendmail() in complexity for a simple test - I'll keep looking for the issue for my mail not going out with my installation.
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1500.0.html - sendmail() vs SMTP
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1501.0.html - SMTP testing
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Objective:
I would like to at least know what limitation (other than myself) stops me from running CiviMail on my shared hosting environment before going to a hosted solution - still digging.

Other things other shared hosting environment people have learned when installing CiviMail or things mentors observe?