# PHPMailer – A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP

## Features
- 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!

## Why you might need it
Many 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.

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 the `mail()` function directly is just plain wrong, if not unsafe!

The 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.

## License
This software is distributed under the [LGPL 2.1](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-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.

## Installation & loading
PHPMailer 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.

Alternatively, if you're not using Composer, you
can [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:

```php
<?php
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\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 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.

## Minimal installation
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 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!

## A Simple Example

```php
<?php
//Import PHPMailer classes into the global namespace
//These must be at the top of your script, not inside a function
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;

//Load Composer's autoloader
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

//Create an instance; passing `true` enables exceptions
$mail = new PHPMailer(true);

try {
    //Server settings
    $mail->SMTPDebug = SMTP::DEBUG_SERVER;                      //Enable verbose debug output
    $mail->isSMTP();                                            //Send using SMTP
    $mail->Host       = 'smtp.example.com';                     //Set the SMTP server to send through
    $mail->SMTPAuth   = true;                                   //Enable SMTP authentication
    $mail->Username   = 'user@example.com';                     //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.com', 'Mailer');
    $mail->addAddress('joe@example.net', 'Joe User');     //Add a recipient
    $mail->addAddress('ellen@example.com');               //Name is optional
    $mail->addReplyTo('info@example.com', 'Information');
    $mail->addCC('cc@example.com');
    $mail->addBCC('bcc@example.com');

    //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 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.

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. See [the mailing list example](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/examples/mailing_list.phps) for further guidance.

That's it. You should now be ready to use PHPMailer!

## Localization
PHPMailer 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](https://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:

```php
//To load the French version
$mail->setLanguage('fr', '/optional/path/to/language/directory/');
```

## Documentation
Start 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.

Examples 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).

To 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.

Complete generated API documentation is [available online](https://phpmailer.github.io/PHPMailer/).

You 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](https://www.phpdoc.org) installed. You may find [the unit tests](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/test/PHPMailer/PHPMailerTest.php) a good reference for how to do various operations such as encryption.

If the documentation doesn't cover what you need, search the [many questions on Stack Overflow](https://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).
