I'm starting to develop an ecommerce website and want to use email as a way of alerting exceptions/order details etc. I'm using a laptop with XP Home on it and wondered if I can set up an SMTP server on it and if so how to do it?
You can. There's a few free packages out there. I've never used any of them so can't recommend but google is your friend. If you have to ask how to do it though it rings alarm bells, the security implications are huge and you run the risk of being a SPAM relayer. Also, even if you can completely nail down the security, a lot of internet organisations reject mail from non recognised IP addresses.
Perhaps I should just wait until my Window7 Pro laptop turns up?
You should do neither, if you dont know what SMTP is or even how it works in its simplest terms then dont bother trying to set one up.
If you are doing ecommerce email would generally built into a hosting package, you know you need to get somebody to host the site dont you ?
If he's just developing something locally though it's a valid requirement, he can switch it to a proper secured SMTP server once it's being hosted somewhere. As the first reply said, just google around for one (I briefly played about with Blat a few months ago and it seemed OK).
Its just for development purposes only, so will only be sending myself mail. Yes, this is all new to me. I've been training myself up on ASP.NET 3.5 for the past couple of months and I'm itching to get started. But SMTP isn't covered well in the stuff I've read so far, it's just assumed you know about it and have the relevent info to plug into your web.config.
OK, i see now, for development, try this, from a quick Google:
http://www.geekgirls.com/net_smtp.htm
...so, yes, it is just a local development setup at the moment, so no involvement with the intended host.
I have downloaded "Free SMTP Server". I guess I need to set up a DNS Server first? This s/w is set to autodetect dns servers on port 25 but does not currently show any.
Once you've set your SMTP server up, this is the relevant bit for the webconfig
<system.net>
<mailSettings>
<smtp deliveryMethod="Network" from="you@yourdomain.com">
<network host="localhost" port="25" defaultCredentials="true"/>
</smtp>
</mailSettings>
</system.net>