PHPMailer: Send emails from your site

This time I would like to talk about the library PHPMailer. This library is ideal if you need to send emails from your web site to its users (e.g: for notifying the data suscription, warning about the near account expiration, etc). A very interesting feature offered by this library is allowing us using a GMail account to send emails (of course, we must be the owners of that account). It is true that PHP already includes functions to send emails from your code (the mail() function for instance), but it was always annoying for me to do it this way.

Firstly, in order to use the mail() function in PHP, we must configure the PHP server properly, setting all the parameters related to send emails in the php.ini file. But this does not end here, the worst thing is that we must have a mail server (eg postfix or qmail, or whatever) running on the same machine where you run your application. If we have our app running on an external server hired for that purpose, no problem, but if we have to maintain the machine (for whatever reason), it is not so easy.

In order to install and maintain a mail server it is required, besides fairly advanced knowledge in the subject (operation, configuration, etc.), a very good knowledge about security, since a mail server is a candy for those who like to “steal” some machines, making them “zombies” and using them as spammers. This is why I opted for this library.

Using the library

The first thing we must do is to download the latest version of this library. Once you have unzipped the file and placed the library directory into the web application directory, we can start to use it. If we want to, we can remove the test directory, examples and docs, since they are not necessary for the correct working of the library.

Let’s see an example. Let’s say that we have shown a form to the user, he fills the form (among other data, he provides us an e-mail) and when he sends it we have to process the data and send an e-mail confirming that the information has been processed. We will send the email through a GMail account, using for that secure SMTP protocol, so we have the peace of mind that Google is behind. Well, in our controller that processes the form we have to include the following code:

include(PHPMailer/class.phpmailer.php);

With this, we have already access to library functions. From now on, we only have to create the object, add all the parameters that we have collected from the form previously presented to the user, and send it. For that, we must add the following code:

$mail = new PHPMailer();

$mail->IsSMTP(); // establish we are going to use SMTP
$mail->SMTPAuth   = true; // enable SMTP authentication
$mail->SMTPSecure = "tls";  // establish the secure protocol that we are going to use with the server
$mail->Host       = "smtp.gmail.com";      // GMail is our SMTP server
$mail->Port       = 587;                   // Gmail's secure SMTP port
$mail->Username   = "minombreusuario@gmail.com";  // our email account (we are the owners)
$mail->Password   = "your_Password";   // password for that account

$mail->SetFrom('info@yourdomain.com', 'Your Name');  //Who is sending the email
$mail->AddReplyTo("response@yourdomain.com","Your Name");  //Who will receive the response if the user replies
$mail->Subject    = "Your data was received";  //Subject of the email
 Your form was received correctly.<br />
 <strong>Thank you very much!</strong>";  //HTML body of the message
$mail->AltBody    = "Hi,n
 Your form was received correctly.n
 Thank you very much!";  //Body of the message if the user cannot read HTML emails

$destination = "someuser@somedomain.com";
$mail->AddAddress($address, "John Doe");

$mail->AddAttachment("images/phpmailer.gif");      // add some attachments if necessary
$mail->AddAttachment("images/phpmailer_mini.gif"); // as many as you want

if(!$mail->Send()) {
echo "Error sending the email: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
 echo "Email sent successfully!";
}

With this we would have ready our code to send emails to users of our site. Now, I would like to clarify a couple of lines of code above, where we create the message body. For convenience, if we send a HTML body, we could have a HTML template (some file with .html extension) where we put the standard message, which is included later in the mail this way:

$body  = file_get_contents('email_template.html');
$body  = eregi_replace("[]",'',$body);
...
...
$mail->MsgHTML($body);

Now we have completely finished our code to send emails from our website via GMail. Finally, I would like to point out that this code is also valid to send emails using an account at any other mail server, as long as we are the owners of that account and we know its password and the server is enabled to send emails via SMTP.