Email Confirmation Failure
The documentation you're reading is the documentation for the old extension and not current email support and may be outdated. As it stands email confirmation is controlled by the $wgEmailAuthentication setting in your LocalSettings.php. It applies to all groups.
>But I am asked to click to confirm, and when I do, I get this error message: "Could not send confirmation mail. Check address for invalid characters. Mailer returned: mailer error"
Assuming your mailing address is valid, probably means that something is wrong with mail support in your OS. If using unix check to see if you can send mail using the command line mail program.
>The email address I have entered matches the address in the LocalSettings.php file.
You mean the emergency contact or password sender address? It really doesn't matter if they match...
>MediaWiki 1.17wmf1 (r96617) PHP 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.12wm1 (apache2handler) MySQL 5.1.47-facebook-r3550-log
Is that really the version you're using? Or is this a Wikimedia site? Or did you really compile your own php and mysql to use the version strings that Wikimedia uses....
Hi! Thanks for trying to figure it out. I have no idea what my version is. I don't remember how I stumbled on that info before; I can't find anywhere on my site that says in a way that gives me real confidence it is about my site, but today under "special pages", and "version" under that, I got a brand new opinion: MediaWiki 1.12.0 PHP 5.2.9 (apache2handler) MySQL 5.0.32-Debian_7etch6
My OS is Windows 7 Home Premium.
My wiki webpage is found at http:\\talk.saltshaker.us/wiki It is hosted by myhosting.com.
The email addresses I tried: pilgrim (at) saltshaker.us which is an alias with the same host that the wiki has, and leach (at) iowatelecom.net.
>MediaWiki 1.12.0 PHP 5.2.9 (apache2handler) MySQL 5.0.32-Debian_7etch6
That's a much more believable version (The other one you gave is the version of this wiki, which is unlikely to be what you're using). It's also a fairly outdated version of MediaWiki (you should consider upgrading perhaps, but that's beside the point),
>My OS is Windows 7 Home Premium.
I meant your webserver's os (based on the version string given above its linux). What sounds most likely is there's something wrong with your host. If you have ssh access, you can test if the mail command works properly. If you don't know how to do that, your best bet is probably to ask your host - tell them that php's mail function is returning false (that's what "mailer error" means, that the mail function returned false).
