Send Email using PHP Script from SMTP Authentication with PHPMailer

All the programming languages provides functions for sending emails. PHP also provides mail() function to send emails. But the main point is to increase email delivery to inbox successfully. While sending simple emails the chances of getting email spam increase. Also simple PHP mail function has limited options for mail formatting and sending properly. To increase email deliverability and speed we are going to use PHPMailer, which providers lots of option for sending emails. It also provides option to send email from SMTP servers.

Step 1: Setup PHPMailer in Application:

Download PHPMailer from Github under lib/ directory of your project, you may change this location as per your need.

# wget https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/archive/master.zip
# unzip master
# mv PHPMailer-master /path/to/project/lib/PHPMailer

Step 2: Sending Test Email using PHPMailer:

Now create an simple php script sendMail.php in your web document root and add below content. Below script is using Gmail smtp server for sending mails. You may use any other SMTP server like Amazon SES, Sendgrid, Mailchimp or Mandril App etc.

<?php
require 'lib/PHPMailer/PHPMailerAutoload.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer;

$mail->isSMTP();
$mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com';
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
$mail->Username = [email protected]';
$mail->Password = '_password_';
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';

$mail->From = [email protected]';
$mail->FromName = 'Your Name';
$mail->addAddress([email protected]');

$mail->isHTML(true);

$mail->Subject = 'Test Mail Subject!';
$mail->Body    = 'This is SMTP Email Test';

if(!$mail->send()) {
    echo 'Message could not be sent.';
    echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
 } else {
    echo 'Message has been sent';
}
?>

Now access this application using browser with your domain name following by script name

http://example.com/sendMail.php