- Probably the world's most popular code for sending email from PHP!
- Used by many open-source projects: WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, Joomla! and many more
- Integrated SMTP support – send without a local mail server
- Send emails with multiple To, CC, BCC, and Reply-to addresses
- Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email
- Add attachments, including inline
- Support for UTF-8 content and 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings
- SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5, and XOAUTH2 mechanisms over SMTPS and SMTP+STARTTLS transports
- Validates email addresses automatically
- Protects against header injection attacks
- Error messages in over 50 languages!
- DKIM and S/MIME signing support
- Compatible with PHP 5.5 and later, including PHP 8.2
- Namespaced to prevent name clashes
- Much more!
Many PHP developers need to send email from their code. The only PHP function that supports this directly ismail().However, it does not provide any assistance for making use of popular features such as encryption, authentication, HTML messages, and attachments.
Formatting 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 themail()function directly is just plain wrong, if not unsafe!
The PHPmail()function usually sends via a local mail server, typically fronted by asendmailbinary 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 themail()function should be avoided when possible; it's both faster andsaferto use SMTP to localhost.
Pleasedon't be tempted to do it yourself – if you don't use PHPMailer, there are many other excellent libraries that you should look at before rolling your own. TrySwiftMailer ,Laminas/Mail,ZetaComponents,etc.
This software is distributed under theLGPL 2.1license, along with theGPL Cooperation Commitment.Please readLICENSEfor information on the software availability and distribution.
PHPMailer is available onPackagist(using semantic versioning), and installation viaComposeris the recommended way to install PHPMailer. Just add this line to yourcomposer.jsonfile:
"phpmailer/phpmailer":"^6.9.1"or run
composer require phpmailer/phpmailerNote that thevendorfolder and thevendor/autoload.phpscript are generated by Composer; they are not part of PHPMailer.
If you want to use XOAUTH2 authentication, you will also need to add a dependency on theleague/oauth2-clientand appropriate service adapters package in yourcomposer.json,or take a look at
by @decomplexity'sSendOauth2 wrapper,especially if you're using Microsoft services.
Alternatively, if you're not using Composer, you
candownload PHPMailer as a zip file,(note that docs and examples are not included in the zip file), then copy the contents of the PHPMailer folder into one of theinclude_pathdirectories specified in your PHP configuration and load each class file manually:
<?php
usePHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
usePHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;
require'path/to/PHPMailer/src/Exception.php';
require'path/to/PHPMailer/src/PHPMailer.php';
require'path/to/PHPMailer/src/SMTP.php';If you're not using theSMTPclass explicitly (you're probably not), you don't need auseline for the SMTP class. Even if you're not using exceptions, you do still need to load theExceptionclass as it is used internally.
PHPMailer 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 the5.2-stable branch.If you're using PHP 5.5 or later (which you should be), switch to the 6.x releases.
The biggest changes are that source files are now in thesrc/folder, and PHPMailer now declares the namespacePHPMailer\PHPMailer.This has several important effects –read the upgrade guidefor more details.
While 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 needsrc/PHPMailer.php.If you're using SMTP, you'll needsrc/SMTP.php,and if you're using POP-before SMTP (veryunlikely!), you'll needsrc/POP3.php.You can skip thelanguagefolder if you're not showing errors to users and can make do with English-only errors. If you're using XOAUTH2 you will needsrc/OAuth.phpas well as the Composer dependencies for the services you wish to authenticate with. Really, it's much easier to use Composer!
<?php
//Import PHPMailer classes into the global namespace
//These must be at the top of your script, not inside a function
usePHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
usePHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;
usePHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;
//Load Composer's autoloader
require'vendor/autoload.php';
//Create an instance; passing `true` enables exceptions
$mail=newPHPMailer(true);
try{
//Server settings
$mail->SMTPDebug=SMTP::DEBUG_SERVER;//Enable verbose debug output
$mail->isSMTP();//Send using SMTP
$mail->Host='smtp.example';//Set the SMTP server to send through
$mail->SMTPAuth=true;//Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Username='user@example';//SMTP username
$mail->Password='secret';//SMTP password
$mail->SMTPSecure=PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_SMTPS;//Enable implicit TLS encryption
$mail->Port=465;//TCP port to connect to; use 587 if you have set `SMTPSecure = PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_STARTTLS`
//Recipients
$mail->setFrom('from@example','Mailer');
$mail->addAddress('[email protected]','Joe User');//Add a recipient
$mail->addAddress('ellen@example');//Name is optional
$mail->addReplyTo('info@example','Information');
$mail->addCC('cc@example');
$mail->addBCC('bcc@example');
//Attachments
$mail->addAttachment('/var/tmp/file.tar.gz');//Add attachments
$mail->addAttachment('/tmp/image.jpg','new.jpg');//Optional name
//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';
$mail->send();
echo'Message has been sent';
}catch(Exception$e) {
echo"Message could not be sent. Mailer Error:{$mail->ErrorInfo} ";
}You'll find plenty to play with in theexamplesfolder, which covers many common scenarios including sending through Gmail, building contact forms, sending to mailing lists, and more.
If 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. Seethe mailing list examplefor further guidance.
That's it. You should now be ready to use PHPMailer!
PHPMailer defaults to English, but in thelanguagefolder, you'll find many translations for PHPMailer error messages that you may encounter. Their filenames containISO 639-1language code for the translations, for examplefrfor French. To specify a language, you need to tell PHPMailer which one to use, like this:
//To load the French version
$mail->setLanguage('fr','/optional/path/to/language/directory/');We welcome corrections and new languages – if you're looking for corrections, run theLanguage/TranslationCompletenessTest.phpscript in the tests folder and it will show any missing translations.
Start reading at theGitHub wiki.If you're having trouble, head forthe troubleshooting guideas it's frequently updated.
Examples of how to use PHPMailer for common scenarios can be found in theexamplesfolder. If you're looking for a good starting point, we recommend you start withthe Gmail example.
To reduce PHPMailer's deployed code footprint, examples are not included if you load PHPMailer via Composer or viaGitHub's zip file download,so you'll need to either clone the git repository or use the above links to get to the examples directly.
Complete generated API documentation isavailable online.
You can generate complete API-level documentation by runningphpdocin the top-level folder, and documentation will appear in thedocsfolder, though you'll need to havePHPDocumentorinstalled. You may findthe unit testsa good reference for how to do various operations such as encryption.
If the documentation doesn't cover what you need, search themany questions on Stack Overflow,and before you ask a question about "SMTP Error: Could not connect to SMTP host.",read the troubleshooting guide.
PHPMailer testsuse PHPUnit 9, witha polyfillto let 9-style tests run on older PHPUnit and PHP versions.
If this isn't passing, is there something you can do to help?
Please disclose any vulnerabilities found responsibly – report security issues to the maintainers privately.
SeeSECURITYandPHPMailer's security advisories on GitHub.
Please submit bug reports, suggestions, and pull requests to theGitHub issue tracker.
We're particularly interested in fi xing edge cases, expanding test coverage, and updating translations.
If you found a mistake in the docs, or want to add something, go ahead and amend the wiki – anyone can edit it.
If 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:
git remote set-url upstream https://github /PHPMailer/PHPMailer.gitPleasedon'tuse the SourceForge or Google Code projects any more; they are obsolete and no longer maintained.
Development time and resources for PHPMailer are provided bySmartmessages.net,the world's only privacy-first email marketing system.
Donations 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" buttonon the project page.If your company uses PHPMailer, consider taking part in Tidelift's enterprise support programme.
Available as part of the Tidelift Subscription.
The maintainers of PHPMailer and thousands of other packages are working with Tidelift to deliver commercial support and maintenance for the open-source packages you use to build your applications. Save time, reduce risk, and improve code health, while paying the maintainers of the exact packages you use.Learn more.
Seechangelog.
- PHPMailer was originally written in 2001 by Brent R. Matzelle as aSourceForge project.
- Marcus Bointon(
coolbruon SF) and Andy Prevost (codeworxtech) took over the project in 2004. - Became an Apache incubator project on Google Code in 2010, managed by Jim Jagielski.
- Marcus createdhis fork on GitHubin 2008.
- Jim and Marcus decide to join forces and use GitHub as the canonical and official repo for PHPMailer in 2013.
- PHPMailer moves tothe PHPMailer organisationon GitHub in 2013.
- Official successor to the SourceForge and Google Code projects.
- Test suite.
- Continuous integration with GitHub Actions.
- Composer support.
- Public development.
- Additional languages and language strings.
- CRAM-MD5 authentication support.
- Preserves full repo history of authors, commits, and branches from the original SourceForge project.
![@dependabot[bot]](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/29110?s=64&v=4){kind=small}
