sending e-mail from mail function php

Question

I can send an e-mail using php mail function. Other languages also have similar functions.

mail(to,subject,message,headers,parameters)

I was under an impression that to send an e-mail you need SMTP credentials. How does this function send emails? Which SMTP server does it use? How does it work?

Answer 1

you have to configure your server to send emails ..

You can send mail from localhost with sendmail package , sendmail package is inbuild in XAMPP. So if you are using XAMPP then you can easily send mail from localhost.

for example you can configure C:\xampp\php\php.ini and c:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.ini for gmail to send mail.

in C:\xampp\php\php.ini find extension=php_openssl.dll and remove the semicolon from the beginning of that line to make SSL working for gmail for localhost.

in php.ini file find [mail function] and change

SMTP=smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port=587
sendmail_from = my-gmail-id@gmail.com
sendmail_path = "\"C:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.exe\" -t"

Now Open C:\xampp\sendmail\sendmail.ini. Replace all the existing code in sendmail.ini with following code

[sendmail]

smtp_server=smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port=587
error_logfile=error.log
debug_logfile=debug.log
auth_username=my-gmail-id@gmail.com
auth_password=my-gmail-password
force_sender=my-gmail-id@gmail.com

Now you have done!! create php file with mail function and send mail from localhost.

PS: don't forgot to replace my-gmail-id and my-gmail-password in above code. Also, don't forget to remove duplicate keys if you copied settings from above. For example comment following line if there is another sendmail_path : sendmail_path="C:\xampp\mailtodisk\mailtodisk.exe" in the php.ini file

REF : LINK

Answer 2

In php.ini, there is a field called SMTP. It is where you set the SMTP server. I think it defaults to localhost. Other related fields include smtp_port and sendmail_from. You use these for a Win32 system.

Answer 3

The PHP mail() function usually sends via a local mail server, typically fronted by a sendmail binary on Linux, BSD and OS X platforms, however, Windows usually doesn't include a local mail server.

Using the mail() function can be a lot of work. Instead use an external library which greatly simplifies this work for you. One such example is PHPMailer