README.md
1
2
3# PHPMailer – A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP
4
5[](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/actions) [](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) [](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) [](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) [](https://phpmailer.github.io/PHPMailer/)
6
7## Features
8- Probably the world's most popular code for sending email from PHP!
9- Used by many open-source projects: WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, Joomla! and many more
10- Integrated SMTP support – send without a local mail server
11- Send emails with multiple To, CC, BCC and Reply-to addresses
12- Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email
13- Add attachments, including inline
14- Support for UTF-8 content and 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings
15- SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5, and XOAUTH2 mechanisms over SMTPS and SMTP+STARTTLS transports
16- Validates email addresses automatically
17- Protects against header injection attacks
18- Error messages in over 50 languages!
19- DKIM and S/MIME signing support
20- Compatible with PHP 5.5 and later, including PHP 8.0
21- Namespaced to prevent name clashes
22- Much more!
23
24## Why you might need it
25Many PHP developers need to send email from their code. The only PHP function that supports this directly is [`mail()`](https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php). However, it does not provide any assistance for making use of popular features such as encryption, authentication, HTML messages, and attachments.
26
27Formatting email correctly is surprisingly difficult. There are myriad overlapping (and conflicting) standards, requiring tight adherence to horribly complicated formatting and encoding rules – the vast majority of code that you'll find online that uses the `mail()` function directly is just plain wrong, if not unsafe!
28
29The PHP `mail()` function usually sends via a local mail server, typically fronted by a `sendmail` binary on Linux, BSD, and macOS platforms, however, Windows usually doesn't include a local mail server; PHPMailer's integrated SMTP client allows email sending on all platforms without needing a local mail server. Be aware though, that the `mail()` function should be avoided when possible; it's both faster and [safer](https://exploitbox.io/paper/Pwning-PHP-Mail-Function-For-Fun-And-RCE.html) to use SMTP to localhost.
30
31*Please* don't be tempted to do it yourself – if you don't use PHPMailer, there are many other excellent libraries that
32you should look at before rolling your own. Try [SwiftMailer](https://swiftmailer.symfony.com/)
33, [Laminas/Mail](https://docs.laminas.dev/laminas-mail/), [ZetaComponents](https://github.com/zetacomponents/Mail) etc.
34
35## License
36This software is distributed under the [LGPL 2.1](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html) license, along with the [GPL Cooperation Commitment](https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/). Please read [LICENSE](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/LICENSE) for information on the software availability and distribution.
37
38## Installation & loading
39PHPMailer is available on [Packagist](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) (using semantic versioning), and installation via [Composer](https://getcomposer.org) is the recommended way to install PHPMailer. Just add this line to your `composer.json` file:
40
41```json
42"phpmailer/phpmailer": "^6.2"
43```
44
45or run
46
47```sh
48composer require phpmailer/phpmailer
49```
50
51Note that the `vendor` folder and the `vendor/autoload.php` script are generated by Composer; they are not part of PHPMailer.
52
53If you want to use the Gmail XOAUTH2 authentication class, you will also need to add a dependency on the `league/oauth2-client` package in your `composer.json`.
54
55Alternatively, if you're not using Composer, you
56can [download PHPMailer as a zip file](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/archive/master.zip), (note that docs and examples are not included in the zip file), then copy the contents of the PHPMailer folder into one of the `include_path` directories specified in your PHP configuration and load each class file manually:
57
58```php
59<?php
60use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
61use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;
62
63require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/Exception.php';
64require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/PHPMailer.php';
65require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/SMTP.php';
66```
67
68If you're not using the `SMTP` class explicitly (you're probably not), you don't need a `use` line for the SMTP class. Even if you're not using exceptions, you do still need to load the `Exception` class as it is used internally.
69
70## Legacy versions
71PHPMailer 5.2 (which is compatible with PHP 5.0 — 7.0) is no longer supported, even for security updates. You will find the latest version of 5.2 in the [5.2-stable branch](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/5.2-stable). If you're using PHP 5.5 or later (which you should be), switch to the 6.x releases.
72
73### Upgrading from 5.2
74The biggest changes are that source files are now in the `src/` folder, and PHPMailer now declares the namespace `PHPMailer\PHPMailer`. This has several important effects – [read the upgrade guide](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/UPGRADING.md) for more details.
75
76### Minimal installation
77While installing the entire package manually or with Composer is simple, convenient, and reliable, you may want to include only vital files in your project. At the very least you will need [src/PHPMailer.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/PHPMailer.php). If you're using SMTP, you'll need [src/SMTP.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/SMTP.php), and if you're using POP-before SMTP (*very* unlikely!), you'll need [src/POP3.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/POP3.php). You can skip the [language](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/language/) folder if you're not showing errors to users and can make do with English-only errors. If you're using XOAUTH2 you will need [src/OAuth.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/OAuth.php) as well as the Composer dependencies for the services you wish to authenticate with. Really, it's much easier to use Composer!
78
79## A Simple Example
80
81```php
82<?php
83//Import PHPMailer classes into the global namespace
84//These must be at the top of your script, not inside a function
85use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
86use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;
87use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;
88
89//Load Composer's autoloader
90require 'vendor/autoload.php';
91
92//Instantiation and passing `true` enables exceptions
93$mail = new PHPMailer(true);
94
95try {
96 //Server settings
97 $mail->SMTPDebug = SMTP::DEBUG_SERVER; //Enable verbose debug output
98 $mail->isSMTP(); //Send using SMTP
99 $mail->Host = 'smtp.example.com'; //Set the SMTP server to send through
100 $mail->SMTPAuth = true; //Enable SMTP authentication
101 $mail->Username = 'user@example.com'; //SMTP username
102 $mail->Password = 'secret'; //SMTP password
103 $mail->SMTPSecure = PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_STARTTLS; //Enable TLS encryption; `PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_SMTPS` encouraged
104 $mail->Port = 587; //TCP port to connect to, use 465 for `PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_SMTPS` above
105
106 //Recipients
107 $mail->setFrom('from@example.com', 'Mailer');
108 $mail->addAddress('joe@example.net', 'Joe User'); //Add a recipient
109 $mail->addAddress('ellen@example.com'); //Name is optional
110 $mail->addReplyTo('info@example.com', 'Information');
111 $mail->addCC('cc@example.com');
112 $mail->addBCC('bcc@example.com');
113
114 //Attachments
115 $mail->addAttachment('/var/tmp/file.tar.gz'); //Add attachments
116 $mail->addAttachment('/tmp/image.jpg', 'new.jpg'); //Optional name
117
118 //Content
119 $mail->isHTML(true); //Set email format to HTML
120 $mail->Subject = 'Here is the subject';
121 $mail->Body = 'This is the HTML message body <b>in bold!</b>';
122 $mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';
123
124 $mail->send();
125 echo 'Message has been sent';
126} catch (Exception $e) {
127 echo "Message could not be sent. Mailer Error: {$mail->ErrorInfo}";
128}
129```
130
131You'll find plenty to play with in the [examples](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/examples) folder, which covers many common scenarios including sending through gmail, building contact forms, sending to mailing lists, and more.
132
133If you are re-using the instance (e.g. when sending to a mailing list), you may need to clear the recipient list to avoid sending duplicate messages. See [the mailing list example](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/examples/mailing_list.phps) for further guidance.
134
135That's it. You should now be ready to use PHPMailer!
136
137## Localization
138PHPMailer defaults to English, but in the [language](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/language/) folder you'll find many translations for PHPMailer error messages that you may encounter. Their filenames contain [ISO 639-1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1) language code for the translations, for example `fr` for French. To specify a language, you need to tell PHPMailer which one to use, like this:
139
140```php
141//To load the French version
142$mail->setLanguage('fr', '/optional/path/to/language/directory/');
143```
144
145We welcome corrections and new languages – if you're looking for corrections, run the [PHPMailerLangTest.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/test/PHPMailerLangTest.php) script in the tests folder and it will show any missing translations.
146
147## Documentation
148Start reading at the [GitHub wiki](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki). If you're having trouble, head for [the troubleshooting guide](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting) as it's frequently updated.
149
150Examples of how to use PHPMailer for common scenarios can be found in the [examples](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/examples) folder. If you're looking for a good starting point, we recommend you start with [the Gmail example](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/examples/gmail.phps).
151
152To reduce PHPMailer's deployed code footprint, examples are not included if you load PHPMailer via Composer or via [GitHub's zip file download](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/archive/master.zip), so you'll need to either clone the git repository or use the above links to get to the examples directly.
153
154Complete generated API documentation is [available online](https://phpmailer.github.io/PHPMailer/).
155
156You can generate complete API-level documentation by running `phpdoc` in the top-level folder, and documentation will appear in the `docs` folder, though you'll need to have [PHPDocumentor](http://www.phpdoc.org) installed. You may find [the unit tests](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/test/PHPMailerTest.php) a good reference for how to do various operations such as encryption.
157
158If the documentation doesn't cover what you need, search the [many questions on Stack Overflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/phpmailer), and before you ask a question about "SMTP Error: Could not connect to SMTP host.", [read the troubleshooting guide](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting).
159
160## Tests
161[PHPMailer tests](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/test/) use PHPUnit 9, with [a polyfill](https://github.com/Yoast/PHPUnit-Polyfills) to let 9-style tests run on older PHPUnit and PHP versions.
162
163[](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/actions)
164
165If this isn't passing, is there something you can do to help?
166
167## Security
168Please disclose any vulnerabilities found responsibly – report security issues to the maintainers privately.
169
170See [SECURITY](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/SECURITY.md) and [PHPMailer's security advisories on GitHub](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/security).
171
172## Contributing
173Please submit bug reports, suggestions and pull requests to the [GitHub issue tracker](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/issues).
174
175We're particularly interested in fixing edge-cases, expanding test coverage and updating translations.
176
177If you found a mistake in the docs, or want to add something, go ahead and amend the wiki – anyone can edit it.
178
179If you have git clones from prior to the move to the PHPMailer GitHub organisation, you'll need to update any remote URLs referencing the old GitHub location with a command like this from within your clone:
180
181```sh
182git remote set-url upstream https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.git
183```
184
185Please *don't* use the SourceForge or Google Code projects any more; they are obsolete and no longer maintained.
186
187## Sponsorship
188Development time and resources for PHPMailer are provided by [Smartmessages.net](https://info.smartmessages.net/), the world's only privacy-first email marketing system.
189
190<a href="https://info.smartmessages.net/"><img src="https://www.smartmessages.net/img/smartmessages-logo.svg" width="550" alt="Smartmessages.net privacy-first email marketing logo"></a>
191
192Donations are very welcome, whether in beer ��, T-shirts ��, or cold, hard cash ��. Sponsorship through GitHub is a simple and convenient way to say "thank you" to PHPMailer's maintainers and contributors – just click the "Sponsor" button [on the project page](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer). If your company uses PHPMailer, consider taking part in Tidelift's enterprise support programme.
193
194## PHPMailer For Enterprise
195
196Available as part of the Tidelift Subscription.
197
198The maintainers of PHPMailer and thousands of other packages are working with Tidelift to deliver commercial
199support and maintenance for the open source packages you use to build your applications. Save time, reduce risk, and
200improve code health, while paying the maintainers of the exact packages you
201use. [Learn more.](https://tidelift.com/subscription/pkg/packagist-phpmailer-phpmailer?utm_source=packagist-phpmailer-phpmailer&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=enterprise&utm_term=repo)
202
203## Changelog
204See [changelog](changelog.md).
205
206## History
207- PHPMailer was originally written in 2001 by Brent R. Matzelle as a [SourceForge project](http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer/).
208- [Marcus Bointon](https://github.com/Synchro) (`coolbru` on SF) and Andy Prevost (`codeworxtech`) took over the project in 2004.
209- Became an Apache incubator project on Google Code in 2010, managed by Jim Jagielski.
210- Marcus created [his fork on GitHub](https://github.com/Synchro/PHPMailer) in 2008.
211- Jim and Marcus decide to join forces and use GitHub as the canonical and official repo for PHPMailer in 2013.
212- PHPMailer moves to [the PHPMailer organisation](https://github.com/PHPMailer) on GitHub in 2013.
213
214### What's changed since moving from SourceForge?
215- Official successor to the SourceForge and Google Code projects.
216- Test suite.
217- Continuous integration with Github Actions.
218- Composer support.
219- Public development.
220- Additional languages and language strings.
221- CRAM-MD5 authentication support.
222- Preserves full repo history of authors, commits and branches from the original SourceForge project.
223
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