Error handling with PHPMailer

I'm trying to use PHPMailer for a small project, but I'm a bit confused about error handling with this software. Hoping someone has experience with it. When I've set up an email and I use:

$result = $mail->Send();

if(!$result) {
    // There was an error
    // Do some error handling things here
} else {
    echo "Email successful";
}

Which works fine, more or less. The problem is when there's an error, PHPMailer also seems to echo the error out, so if there's a problem, it just sends that info directly to the browser, essentially breaking any error handling I"m trying to do.

Is there a way to silence these messages? Its not throwing an exception, its just printing out the error, which in my test case is:

invalid address: @invalid@email You must provide at least one recipient email address.

Its meant to be an error, but it should be residing in $mail->ErrorInfo; not being echo'd out by the software.

Solution 1:

PHPMailer uses Exceptions. Try to adopt the following code:

require_once '../class.phpmailer.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer(true); //defaults to using php "mail()"; the true param means it will throw exceptions on errors, which we need to catch

try {
  $mail->AddReplyTo('[email protected]', 'First Last');
  $mail->AddAddress('[email protected]', 'John Doe');
  $mail->SetFrom('[email protected]', 'First Last');
  $mail->AddReplyTo('[email protected]', 'First Last');
  $mail->Subject = 'PHPMailer Test Subject via mail(), advanced';
  $mail->AltBody = 'To view the message, please use an HTML compatible email viewer!'; // optional - MsgHTML will create an alternate automatically
  $mail->MsgHTML(file_get_contents('contents.html'));
  $mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer.gif');      // attachment
  $mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer_mini.gif'); // attachment
  $mail->Send();
  echo "Message Sent OK\n";
} catch (phpmailerException $e) {
  echo $e->errorMessage(); //Pretty error messages from PHPMailer
} catch (Exception $e) {
  echo $e->getMessage(); //Boring error messages from anything else!
}

Solution 2:

You can get more info about the error with the method $mail->ErrorInfo. For example:

if(!$mail->send()) {
    echo 'Message could not be sent.';
    echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
    echo 'Message has been sent';
}

This is an alternative to the exception model that you need to active with new PHPMailer(true). But if can use exception model, use it as @Phil Rykoff answer.

This comes from the main page of PHPMailer on github https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.

Solution 3:

Please note!!! You must use the following format when instantiating PHPMailer!

$mail = new PHPMailer(true);

If you don't exceptions are ignored and the only thing you'll get is an echo from the routine! I know this is well after this was created but hopefully it will help someone.

Solution 4:

Just had to fix this myself. The above answers don't seem to take into account the $mail->SMTPDebug = 0; option. It may not have been available when the question was first asked.

If you got your code from the PHPMail site, the default will be $mail->SMTPDebug = 2; // enables SMTP debug information (for testing)

https://github.com/Synchro/PHPMailer/blob/master/examples/test_smtp_gmail_advanced.php

Set the value to 0 to suppress the errors and edit the 'catch' part of your code as explained above.