which is where the 'working email server' should be 
There is no default email server in a local environment. You have to install it if you want one. I test all of my email related routines on my web server because I don't want an email server running on my local machine.
I'm still not sure what you are trying to do, but if you want a simple contact form you would:
- Create a form
- Use Universal Email to send the contents by email
If you want to store the contents of the form in a database, you would then use one of the databases from WA or create your own.
PHP is what is used to process the the code. Apache is what processes the standard html. MySQL is the database for storing data.
