Sending emails from PHP

For sending emails from your PHP application you will need to use an external SMTP server. Several options are listed on our dedicated section.

You can use a mailing library such as PHPMailer (or equivalent) to send emails from your PHP application via an external SMTP server.

Install PHPMailer using composer (see Declaring Dependencies for further help):

composer require phpmailer/phpmailer

Then use a script like the following one to send e-mails (notice the use of environment variables):

Example Using PHPMailer

<?php
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer(true);

try {
    // Server settings
    $mail->isSMTP();
    $mail->Host       = getenv('SMTP_SERVER');
    $mail->SMTPAuth   = true;
    $mail->Username   = getenv('SMTP_USERNAME');
    $mail->Password   = getenv('SMTP_PASSWORD');
    $mail->SMTPSecure = PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_STARTTLS;
    $mail->Port       = getenv('SMTP_PORT');

    // Recipients
    $mail->setFrom('from@example.com', 'Sender Name');
    $mail->addAddress('recipient@example.com', 'Recipient Name');
    $mail->addReplyTo('reply@example.com', 'Reply Name');

    // Content
    $mail->isHTML(true);
    $mail->Subject = 'Test Email from PHPMailer';
    $mail->Body    = '<p>This is a test email sent using PHPMailer from my app hosted on Scalingo.</p>';
    $mail->AltBody = 'This is a test email sent using PHPMailer from my app hosted on Scalingo.';

    $mail->send();
    echo 'Message has been sent';
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "Message could not be sent. Mailer Error: {$mail->ErrorInfo}";
}

Last update: 10 Dec 2024 Suggest edits