If you run Joomla on a local installation, such as with Xampp, you may run into some difficulty setting up the SMTP mail settings to send mail, if you try the included Mercury mail server component.

I found a very simple (and free) program for just this purpose- Free SMTP Server (http://www.softstack.com/). It runs on Windows and is very easy to setup.

Once installed, you click the Options button to view the settings, but you’ll want to accept the defaults. It’s ready to go out of the box.

On the Joomla admin side, go to Site | Global Configuration and on the Server tab, in the Mail Settings section, just be sure you select the following important options:

Mailer: SMTP Server
Authentication: No
Host: localhost