How to send emails from your desktop

[ampakine]

I'm on ubuntu and after googling it I came across references to postfix so I looked up some tutorials on it but they all seem to be fairly complicated and require far more knowledge than I have. I don't mind learning lots of new stuff (on the contrary I like it) beforehand but all I want to do is figure out how to setup a desktop SMTP server so I can send emails independantly of internet services like gmail etc. I know how to send emails from my web server with PHP but I want to learn how to send them directly off my desktop. Is postfix the tool to use for this? If so do I have to follow this tutorial:
http://www.postfix-tutorial.com/
just to send emails or is that overkill?

[Goatboy]

postfix is the backend that handles your mail. You can use the command-line to interact with it, or you can use a GUI-based program like Thunderbird (I believe).

[goluhaque]

I'm on ubuntu and after googling it I came across references to postfix so I looked up some tutorials on it but they all seem to be fairly complicated and require far more knowledge than I have. I don't mind learning lots of new stuff (on the contrary I like it) beforehand but all I want to do is figure out how to setup a desktop SMTP server so I can send emails independantly of internet services like gmail etc. I know how to send emails from my web server with PHP but I want to learn how to send them directly off my desktop. Is postfix the tool to use for this? If so do I have to follow this tutorial:
http://www.postfix-tutorial.com/
just to send emails or is that overkill?

I believe XAMPP creates a virtual server and blah blah blah. More importantly , XAMPP for windows does come with Mercury Mail or something like that which creates a SMTP server and which can be used to send emails.

[ampakine]

postfix is the backend that handles your mail. You can use the command-line to interact with it, or you can use a GUI-based program like Thunderbird (I believe).

Ah right, I suppose I can use PHP to interact with it too.