How to send email with SMTP in PHP?

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is a TCP/IP protocol of the internet standard for electronic mail transmission from one user to another. In this, mail is pushed to the destination mail server or either POP or IMAP is used to retrieve the mail. For this, we need SMTP Server details like HOSTNAME, USERNAME, PASSWORD and PORT NUMBER.

To send email using an SMTP Server in PHP, we are using the PHPMailer Library. So, we need to download and include the PHPMailer library in mail sending script.

Click on the link below to download the PHP mailer class from GitHub and include it in your script.
Download class.phpmailer.php

This library needs various configuration options to configure and customise the email sending functionality as per your requirements. By using this, we can send a text or HTML email with single or multiple attachments. Let's create a PHP file and copy and paste this code. Make sure to place the downloaded PHPMailer library file in the same directory and call the PHP file in your browser to send mail.

<?php 
     include 'class.phpmailer.php';
     $mail = new PHPMailer();
     $mail->CharSet =  "utf-8";
     $mail->IsSMTP();
     $mail->SMTPAuth = true;
     $mail->Host = 'HOST_NAME';
     $mail->Username = 'USER_NAME';
     $mail->Password = 'PASSWORD';
     $mail->Port = 'PORT';
     $mail->setFrom('fromemail@yourdomain.com', 'Your Name');
     $mail->AddAddress('toemail@domain.com', 'To Name');
     $mail->addCC('ccemail@domain.com');
     $mail->addBCC('bccemail@example.com');
 
     $mail->Subject  =  'Test Subject';
     $mail->IsHTML(true); 
     $mail->Body    = 'Your Message Body';
     if ($mail->send()) {
          echo "Message sent!";
     } else {
         echo "Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
     }
?>

In this script, we first included the PHPMailer class and then created the object of the PHPMailer class. The IsSMTP() function tells that we are using SMTP to send mail. You have to change the HOST_NAME, USER_NAME, PASSWORD and PORT NUMBER. Write the sender's email address and name in setFrom() and the recipient address in AddAddress(). The IsHTML() function is used to set the email format to HTML.