PHP: Easily send email with PHPMailer

PHP Mailer is a PHP class for PHP that provides a package of functions to send email. It is an efficient way to send e-mail within PHP. The following are some features of PHPMailer:-

– Sending HTML email
– Sending email with attachments
– Sending email to multiple recepients via to, CC, BCC, etc
– Supports nearly all possiblities to send email: mail(), Sendmail, qmail & direct to SMTP server

Sample Code Example

Note isMail() function in the code. This indicates that email is to be sent through mail() function of php.

Sending email using mail() function:-

require_once('phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php');

$mail = new PHPMailer(); // defaults to using php "mail()"

// this indicates that mail() function is to be used to send email
$mail->IsMail();

$body = "Test body message";
$mail->AddAddress("yourname@example.com", "John Doe");
$mail->Subject = "PHPMailer Test Subject via mail(), basic";
$mail->MsgHTML($body);

if(!$mail->Send()) {
echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
echo "Message sent!";
}

Sending email using SMTP

Along with using SMTP to send email, other functions are also being used. Like, adding reply-to address and from address. Also, notice that multiple reply-to address and multiple to-address are being added. Attachment function is also being included in the below code. You can add multiple attachment.

require_once('phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php');

$mail = new PHPMailer(); // defaults to using php "mail()"

$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->Host = "smtp.example.com";

/**
* optional
* used only when SMTP requires authentication
* if no authentication required then
* you can set below as: SMTPAuth = false
*/
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
$mail->Username = 'smtp_username';
$mail->Password = 'smtp_password';

$mail->AddReplyTo("name@yourdomain.com","First Last");
$mail->AddReplyTo("name2@yourdomain.com","First Last2");

$mail->SetFrom('name@yourdomain.com', 'First Last');

$body = "Test body message";

$mail->AddAddress("yourname@example.com", "John Doe");
$mail->AddAddress("yourname2@example.com", "John Doe2");

$mail->Subject = "PHPMailer Test Subject via mail(), basic";
$mail->MsgHTML($body);

$mail->AddAttachment("images/phpmailer.gif"); // attachment
$mail->AddAttachment("images/phpmailer_mini.gif"); // attachment

if(!$mail->Send()) {
echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
echo "Message sent!";
}

Download PHPMailer

For PHP 4 | For PHP 5 and above