PHPMailer - A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP

Class Features

• Probably the world's most popular code for sending email from PHP!
• Used by many open-source projects: Drupal, SugarCRM, Yii, Joomla! and many more
• Send emails with multiple TOs, CCs, BCCs and REPLY-TOs
• Redundant SMTP servers
• Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email
• Support for 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encoding
• Uses the same methods as the very popular AspEmail active server (COM) component
• SMTP authentication
• Native language support
• Word wrap
• Compatible with PHP 5.0 and later
• Much more!

Why you might need it

Many PHP developers utilize email in their code. The only PHP function that supports this is the mail() function. However, it does not provide any assistance for making use of popular features such as HTML-based emails and attachments.

Formatting email correctly is surprisingly difficult. There are myriad overlapping RFCs, requiring tight adherence to horribly complicated formatting and encoding rules - the vast majority of code that you'll find online that uses the mail() function directly is just plain wrong! Please don't be tempted to do it yourself - if you don't use PHPMailer, there are many other excellent libraries that you should look at before rolling your own - try SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail, eZcomponents etc.

The PHP mail() function usually sends via a local mail server, typically fronted by a sendmail binary on Linux, BSD and OS X platforms, however, Windows usually doesn't include a local mail server; PHPMailer's integrated SMTP implementation allows email sending on Windows platforms without a local mail server.

License

This software is licenced under the LGPL. Please read LICENSE for information on the software availability and distribution.

Installation

Copy the contents of the PHPMailer folder into somewhere that's in your PHP include_path setting.

A Simple Example

<?php
require 'class.phpmailer.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer;

$mail->IsSMTP();                                      // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->Host = 'smtp1.example.com;smtp2.example.com';  // Specify main and backup server
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;                               // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Username = 'jswan';                            // SMTP username
$mail->Password = 'secret';                           // SMTP password
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';                            // Enable encryption, 'ssl' also accepted

$mail->From = 'from@example.com';
$mail->FromName = 'Mailer';
$mail->AddAddress('josh@example.net', 'Josh Adams');  // Add a recipient
$mail->AddAddress('ellen@example.com');               // Name is optional
$mail->AddReplyTo('info@example.com', 'Information');
$mail->AddCC('cc@example.com');
$mail->AddBCC('bcc@example.com');

$mail->WordWrap = 50;                                 // Set word wrap to 50 characters
$mail->AddAttachment('/var/tmp/file.tar.gz');         // Add attachments
$mail->AddAttachment('/tmp/image.jpg', 'new.jpg');    // Optional name
$mail->IsHTML(true);                                  // Set email format to HTML

$mail->Subject = 'Here is the subject';
$mail->Body    = 'This is the HTML message body <b>in bold!</b>';
$mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';

if(!$mail->Send()) {
   echo 'Message could not be sent.';
   echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
   exit;
}

echo 'Message has been sent';

You'll find plenty more to play with in the examples folder.

That's it. You should now be ready to use PHPMailer!

Localization

PHPMailer defaults to English, but in the languages folder you'll find numerous translations for PHPMailer error messages that you may encounter. Their filenames contain ISO 639-1 language code for the translations, for example fr for French. To specify a language, you need to tell PHPMailer which one to use, like this:

// To load the French version
$mail->SetLanguage('fr', '/optional/path/to/language/directory/');

Documentation

You'll find some basic user-level docs in the docs folder, and you can generate complete API-level documentation using the generatedocs.sh shell script in the docs folder, though you'll need to install PHPDocumentor first.

Tests

You'll find a PHPUnit test script in the test folder.

Contributing

Please submit bug reports, suggestions and pull requests to the Google Code tracker or the GitHub issue tracker.

We're particularly interested in fixing edge-cases, expanding test coverage and updating translations.

Please don't use the sourceforge project any more.

Changelog

See changelog.txt

History

• PHPMailer was originally written in 2001 by Brent R. Matzelle as a SourceForge project.
• Marcus Bointon (coolbru on SF) and Andy Prevost (codeworxtech) took over the project in 2004.
• The project became an Apache incubator project on Google Code in 2010, managed by Jim Jagielski
• Marcus maintains a GitHub repository that's kept in sync with the Google Code project as far as is practical.