PHPMailer Guide

When it comes to adding email functionality to your PHP app, PHPMailer class is the winning option. It is compatible with most of the PHP frameworks (Laravel or Symfony are based on the SwiftMailer library, though, but it is still possible to use PHPMailer as well.) PHPMailer provides powerful functionality to create HTML emails with attachments and send them to multiple recipients via SMTP or a local webserver. Learn how to easily use all these options in this tutorial!

What is PHPMailer

PHPMailer is the classic email sending library for PHP. It supports several ways of sending email messages such as mail(), Sendmail, qmail, and direct dispatch to SMTP servers. In addition, it provides a list of advanced features:

• SMTP authentication
• secure/MIME encryption
• support of TLS and SSL protocols
• HTML content along with plain text
• multiple fs, string, and binary attachments
• embedded images support 

Sending Email With PHPMailer and SMTP

To send emails with PHPMailer and SMTP, you need to install PHPMailer and configure SMTP settings first.

How to install PHPMailer

Download files with PHPMailer source code, then copy the contents of the PHPMailer folder to one of the include_path directories specified in your PHP configuration, and load each class file manually:

<?php
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;

require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/Exception.php';
require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/PHPMailer.php';
require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/SMTP.php';

Adding an Exception class will help you handle errors and debug them. In PHP it works similarly to the other programming languages. So, without it, if there is an error in your email sending code, you will just see a message saying Exception class is not found, but you won’t be provided with any details on how to debug it. We will describe debugging is a separate section of this post.

To see detailed instructions on installation, check PHPMailer documentation on Github.

Using SMTP

You can use the mail server of an another host to send email, but for this you first need to have authentication. For example, to send an email from Gmail’s mail server, you need to have a Gmail account.

SMTP is a protocol used by mail clients to send an email send request to a mail server. Once the mail server verifies the email, it sends it to the destination mail server.

Here’s an example of sending an email from Gmail’s mail server from your domain. You don’t need a local mail server to run the code. We’ll be using the SMTP protocol:

<?php
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;


require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/Exception.php';
require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/PHPMailer.php';
require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/SMTP.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer(true);

//Enable SMTP debugging.
$mail->SMTPDebug = 3;                               
//Set PHPMailer to use SMTP.
$mail->isSMTP();            
//Set SMTP host name                          
$mail->Host = "smtp.yourdomain.com";
//Set this to true if SMTP host requires authentication to send email
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;                          
//Provide username and password     
$mail->Username = "name@yourdomain.com";                 
$mail->Password = "super_secret_password";                           
//If SMTP requires TLS encryption then set it
$mail->SMTPSecure = "tls";                           
//Set TCP port to connect to
$mail->Port = 587;                                   

$mail->From = "name@yourdomain.com";
$mail->FromName = "Full Name";

$mail->addAddress("name@example.com", "Recipient Name");
$mail->addCC("cc1@example.com", "Additional Name");

$mail->isHTML(true);

$mail->Subject = "Subject Text";
$mail->Body = "<i>Mail body in HTML</i>";
$mail->AltBody = "This is the plain text version of the email content";

try {
    $mail->send();
    echo "Message has been sent successfully";
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
}

Before you send via SMTP, you need to find out the host name, port number, encryption type if required and if authentication is required you also need the username and password.

One big advantage in using remote SMTP over local mail is that if you use PHP’s mail() function to send email with the from address domain set to anything other than the local domain name (name of the server), then the recipient’s email server’s attack filters will mark it as spam. For example, if you send an email from a server with actual host name example.com with the from address name@gmail.com to name@yahoo.com, then Yahoo’s servers will mark it as spam or display a message to the user not to trust the email because the mail’s origin is example.com and yet it presents itself as if coming from gmail.com. Although you own name@gmail.com, there’s no way for Yahoo to find that out.

Source:

• Source 1
• Source 2