Hello ,

Does anybody know what the industry term is for the feature to send
emails from scripts ?

For those of you for example who are familiar with php, you know that
there is a a mail() function in php that appends messages to the local mail
server usually sendmail or whatever...etc.

It's it called email forwarding ??
I'm not quite sure and i need a quick decisive answer because I'm in search
of a hosting service that provides extensive hosting features and one
of the most important things is to access to the local mailing system.

Regards

Basically its a mailserver. Technically, forwarding is something else (you can have a list of aliases in your home dir in a file called .forward : http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/comp/m...forw_unix.html )
I believe most hosting services allow you to run a mailserver. Just ask.

It depends on what operating system you're calling it from. On windows it uses a direct socket connection. On linux in particular it uses a mail binary to let the system figure out how to deal with the message (sendmail or mail I believe.) Almost any hosting provider that provides email also will have something available on this front. Of course you can always just use the PEAR::Mail package which is really a better way to do it in the first place.