Sending email with PHP from an SMTP server

$from = "[email protected]";
$headers = "From:" . $from;
echo mail ("[email protected]" ,"testmailfunction" , "Oj",$headers);

I have trouble sending email in PHP. I get an error: SMTP server response: 530 SMTP authentication is required.

I was under the impression that you can send email without SMTP to verify. I know that this mail will propably get filtered out, but that doesn't matter right now.

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/smtp
SMTP = localhost
; http://php.net/smtp-port
smtp_port = 25

; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/sendmail-from
sendmail_from = [email protected]

This is the setup in the php.ini file. How should I set up SMTP? Are there any SMTP servers that require no verification or must I setup a server myself?

Solution 1:

When you are sending an e-mail through a server that requires SMTP Auth, you really need to specify it, and set the host, username and password (and maybe the port if it is not the default one - 25).

For example, I usually use PHPMailer with similar settings to this ones:

$mail = new PHPMailer();

// Settings
$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';

$mail->Host       = "mail.example.com";    // SMTP server example
$mail->SMTPDebug  = 0;                     // enables SMTP debug information (for testing)
$mail->SMTPAuth   = true;                  // enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Port       = 25;                    // set the SMTP port for the GMAIL server
$mail->Username   = "username";            // SMTP account username example
$mail->Password   = "password";            // SMTP account password example

// Content
$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';

$mail->send();

You can find more about PHPMailer here: https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

Solution 2:

<?php
ini_set("SMTP", "aspmx.l.google.com");
ini_set("sendmail_from", "[email protected]");

$message = "The mail message was sent with the following mail setting:\r\nSMTP = aspmx.l.google.com\r\nsmtp_port = 25\r\nsendmail_from = [email protected]";

$headers = "From: [email protected]";

mail("[email protected]", "Testing", $message, $headers);
echo "Check your email now....&lt;BR/>";
?>

or, for more details, read on.

Solution 3:

For Unix users, mail() is actually using Sendmail command to send email. Instead of modifying the application, you can change the environment. msmtp is an SMTP client with Sendmail compatible CLI syntax which means it can be used in place of Sendmail. It only requires a small change to your php.ini.

sendmail_path = "/usr/bin/msmtp -C /path/to/your/config -t"

Then even the lowly mail() function can work with SMTP goodness. It is super useful if you're trying to connect an existing application to mail services like sendgrid or mandrill without modifying the application.

Solution 4:

Here is a way to do it with PHP PEAR

// Pear Mail Library
require_once "Mail.php";

$from = '<[email protected]>'; //change this to your email address
$to = '<[email protected]>'; // change to address
$subject = 'Insert subject here'; // subject of mail
$body = "Hello world! this is the content of the email"; //content of mail

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

$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp', array(
        'host' => 'ssl://smtp.gmail.com',
        'port' => '465',
        'auth' => true,
        'username' => '[email protected]', //your gmail account
        'password' => 'snip' // your password
    ));

// Send the mail
$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $body);

//check mail sent or not
if (PEAR::isError($mail)) {
    echo '<p>'.$mail->getMessage().'</p>';
} else {
    echo '<p>Message successfully sent!</p>';
}

If you use Gmail SMTP remember to enable SMTP in your Gmail account, under settings

EDIT: If you can't find Mail.php on debian/ubuntu you can install php-pear with

sudo apt install php-pear

Then install the mail extention:

sudo pear install mail
sudo pear install Net_SMTP
sudo pear install Auth_SASL
sudo pear install mail_mime

Then you should be able to load it by simply require_once "Mail.php" else it is located here: /usr/share/php/Mail.php