Sending SMTP mail to gmail using PHP

Sending mail from your web server is a very common thing that many of us need to do. To do this, the most common approach is to use the following PHP code:mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

      This method sends a copy of the email, directly to the recipients mail server from the web server. However generally speaking, the web server is not the real mail server for the domain you’re trying to send from which can cause major issues.For example, lets say I have a website at www.myweb.com and when someone registers it sends them an email from the address website@myweb.com. The recipients mail servers spam filtering facility may do an MX lookup on the myweb.com domain and notice that the real mail server for the myweb.com has a different IP address to the address where the email is originating from (the web servers IP address). For this reason web server emails are often flagged as spam and thus never received by the intended recipient.To avoid this, we can relay the mail through the domains real mail server using SMTP. Using this method the mail will come to the recipients mail server from the real mail server for the senders domain as seen in its MX records. This then avoids the problematic spam filter rule.To achieve this I use the Mail.php class as found in the PEAR::Mail library located at http://pear.php.net/package/Mail. If you’re using CentOS like me, you can easily install this package using the following 

command#yum install php-pear-Mail

In this example I’m connecting to a gmail server which requires the connection to be over SSL: 

<?php 

require_once('Mail.php');

$host = 'ssl://smtp.gmail.com';

$port = '465';

$username = '<your email address>';

$password = '<yourPassword>';

$subject = 'my subject';

$to = '<to email address>';

$from = $username;$message = 'test';

$headers = array ('From' => $from,'To' => $to,'Subject' =>subject);

$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp',

array ('host' => $host,'port' =>; $port,'auth' => true,'username' => $username,'password' => $password));

$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $message);

if (PEAR::isError($mail)) {

  echo("<p>" . $mail->getMessage() . "</p>");

} else {

  echo("<p>Message successfully sent!</p>");

}

?>

If SSL wasn’t required I’d just need to remove the ‘ssl://’ from in front of the host declaration and change the port to 25 like this:

$host = 'mail.myweb.com';

$port = '25';

Obviously you’ll need to ensure that your firewall allows your web server to make connections to your smtp host over port 25 or 465 for SSL.

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

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.