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.
This 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.
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. Just add this line to your `composer.json` file:
Note that the `vendor` folder and the `vendor/autoload.php` script are generated by Composer; they are not part of PHPMailer.
If 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`.
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:
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.
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 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.
The 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.
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!
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!
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](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:
We 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.
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.
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](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.
If 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).
[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.
See [SECURITY](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/SECURITY.md) and [PHPMailer's security advisories on GitHub](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/security).
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:
Development time and resources for PHPMailer are provided by [Smartmessages.net](https://info.smartmessages.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" button [on the project page](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer). If your company uses PHPMailer, consider taking part in Tidelift's enterprise support programme.
