How to send test emails using php mail from your local wamp installation

How do you send emails using plain PHP mail on WAMP on Windows?

Normally, PHP mail works by using Sendmail which is installed on *nixes, so it doesn't work on a Windows box. However, normally we just rewrite our code to using a SMTP server, but what about when we really don't want to - or can't - modify third-party code?

Fake sendmail to the rescue!

Prequisites 

Make sure that you get the following:

• Wampserver - or any Windows based LAMP stack
• Fake Sendmail

Fake sendmail - sendmail.exe - emulates Sendmails "-t" option to send emails and it needs a working SMTP configuration. For this example we use a Gmail account, but you can use any compatible SMTP server.

If you've installed Wampserver in C:\wamp, unzip the contents of the fake sendmail archive into C:\wamp\sendmail. Otherwise adjust accordingly.

Configuration 

Sendmail 

Now, we need to edit C:\wamp\sendmail\sendmail.ini:


smtp_server=smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port=465
auth_username=user@gmail.com
auth_password=your_password


The above will work against a Gmail account. :)

PHP

Now we need to edit php.ini and set sendmail_path:

Search for the line ';sendmail_path = "\"YOUR_XAMPP_PATH (or) YOUR_WAMP_PATH\sendmail\sendmail.exe\" -t"'
If it has a ';' in the beggining, remove it

sendmail_path = "C:\wamp\sendmail\sendmail.exe -t"

Now, restart Apache, and that is basically all you need to do.

Sending a test email

Now we can't wait to test if it works!

Create a php script, like this:


<?php
$to      = 'some@email.here';
$subject = 'Fake sendmail test';
$message = 'If we can read this, it means that our fake Sendmail setup works!';
$headers = 'From: your@email.here' . "\r\n" .
    'Reply-To: your@email.here' . "\r\n" .
    'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

if(mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)) {
    echo 'Email sent successfully!';
} else {
    die('Failure: Email was not sent!');
}
?>

Put it in your www directory and run it.

If it worked successfully - you should receive an email from yourself shortly - you can now use the 'vanilla' PHP mail function. And you don't need to modify existing code to work on non-sendmail platforms.

Donot forget to give your comments /suggestions and refer to your friends.