How to send mail with google app engine

Question

I can send mail with PHPMailer using Google's servers. It turned out the limit of sent emails is 99/day. So I digged deeper and found that I can use Google App Engine to send emails for $0.0001 with a 1.7 millions/day limit.

I have a VPS running CentOS that I access via Putty (I have basic linux knowledge) and CPanel. I installed Python and the App Engine PHP SDK. The PHP version is 5.4.22.

I would like to send mail with the given example but I am stuck at the first line. While the php file is in the public_html folder, the appengine is installed outside:

root@server1 [~]# locate Message.php
/root/google_appengine/php/sdk/google/appengine/api/mail/Message.php

The code:

<?php
require_once 'google/appengine/api/mail/Message.php';
use google\appengine\api\mail\Message;

$message_body = 'Hello. This is the body of the message.';

$mail_options = [
  'sender' => 'support@mycompany.com',
  'to' => 'myname@gmail.com',
  'subject' => 'Your account has been activated.',
  'textBody' => $message_body
];

try {
  $message = new Message($mail_options);
  $message->send();
} catch (InvalidArgumentException $e) {
    echo 'error: ';
}
?>

So I get the obvious error:

Warning: require_once(google/appengine/api/mail/Message.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/mycompany/public_html/test_googleappsmail.php on line 2

Furthermore, the docs are not clear if I should do anything in the Google Developer Console. I created a project but I have no idea what to do with it. All I want is to send e-mails.

Could anyone point me into the right direction and tell me how to use this code?

Answer 1

I created a simple demo of Google App Engine - PHP - Mail API.

Github Repository : https://github.com/sasidhar/gae-php-mail

It is working fine with the default settings.

Hope this helps.

PHP Code Snippet

use \google\appengine\api\mail\Message;

try {

    $message = new Message();
    $message->setSender("sasidhar@sasidhar.com");
    $message->addTo($email);
    $message->setSubject($subject);
    $message->setTextBody($mailBody);
    $message->send();

    header("Location: /mail_sent");

} catch (InvalidArgumentException $e) {

    $error = "Unable to send mail. $e";
}