# PHPMailer - A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP
Build status: [](https://travis-ci.org/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)
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[](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) [](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) [](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) [](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer)
## Class 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 TOs, CCs, BCCs and REPLY-TOs
- Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email
- Support for UTF-8 co
ntent and 8bit, b
ase64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings
- SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, NTLM, CRAM-MD5 and Google's XOAUTH2 mechanisms over SSL and TLS transports
- Error messages in 47 languages!
- DKIM and S/MIME signing support
- Compatible with PHP 5.0 and later
- Much more!
## Why you might need it
Many PHP developers utilize email in their code. The o
nly PHP function that supports this is the mail() function. However, it does not provide any assistance for making use of popular features such as HTML-b
ased emails and attachments.
Formatting email correctly is surprisingly difficult. There are myriad overlapping RFCs, requiring tight adherence to horribly complicated formatting and encoding rules - the vast majority of code that you'll find o
nline that uses the mail() function directly is just plain wrong!
*Please* don't be tempted to do it yourself - if you don't use PHPMailer, there are many other excellent libraries that you should look at before rolling your own - try SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail, eZcompo
nents etc.
The PHP mail() function usually sends via a local mail server, typically fro
nted by a `sendmail` binary on Linux, BSD and OS X platforms, however, Windows usually doesn't include a local mail server; PHPMailer's integrated SMTP implementation allows email sending on Windows platforms without a local mail server.
## License
This software is distributed under the [LGPL 2.1](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html) license. Please read LICENSE for information on the
software availability and distribution.
## Installation & loading
PHPMailer is available via [Composer/Packagist](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) (using semantic versioning), so just add this line to your `composer.json` file:
```json
"phpmailer/phpmailer": "~5.2"
```
or
```sh
composer require phpmailer/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.
Alternatively, copy the co
ntents of the PHPMailer folder into somewher
e that's in your PHP `include_path` setting. If you don't speak git or just want a tarball, click the 'zip' button at the top of the page in GitHub.
If you're not using composer's autoloader, PHPMailer provides an SPL-compatible autoloader, and that is the preferred way of loading the library - just `require '/path/to/PHPMailerAutoload.php';` and everything should work. The autoloader does not throw errors if it can't find classes so it prepends itself to the SPL list, allowing your own (or your f
ramework's) autoloader to catch errors. SPL autoloading was introduced in PHP 5.1.0, so if you are using a version older than that you will need to require/include each class manually.
PHPMailer does *not* declare a namespace because namespaces were o
nly introduced in PHP 5.3.
If you want to use Google's XOAUTH2 authentication mechanism, you need to be running at least PHP 5.4, and load the dependencies listed in `composer.json`.
### Minimal installation
While installing the entire package manually or with composer is simple, co
nvenient and reliable, you may want to include o
nly vital files in your project. At the very least you will need [class.phpmailer.php](class.phpmailer.php). If you're using SMTP, you'll need [class.smtp.php](class.smtp.php), and if you're using POP-before SMTP, you'll need [class.pop3.php](class.pop3.php). For all of these, we recommend you use [the autoloader](PHPMailerAutoload.php) too as otherwise you will either have to `require` all classes manually or use some other autoloader. You can skip the [language](language/) folder if you're not showing errors to users and can make do with English-o
nly errors. You may need the additio
nal classes in the [extras](extras/) folder if you are using those features, including NTLM authentication and ics generation. If you're using Google XOAUTH2 you will need `class.phpmaileroauth.php` and `class.oauth.php` classes too, as well as the composer dependencies.
## A Simple Example
```php
<?php
require 'PHPMailerAutoload.php';
$mail = new PHPMailer;
//$mail->SMTPDebug = 3; // Enable verbose debug output
$mail->isSMTP(); // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->Host = 'smtp1.example.com;smtp2.example.com'; // Specify main and backup SMTP servers
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Username = 'user@example.com'; // SMTP username
$mail->Password = 'secret'; // SMTP password
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls'; // Enable TLS encryption, `ssl` also accepted
$mail->Port = 587; // TCP port to co
nnect to
$mail->setFrom('from@example.com', 'Mailer');
$mail->addAddress('joe@example.net', 'Joe User'); // Add a recipient
$mail->addAddress('ellen@example.com'); // Name is optio
nal
$mail->addReplyTo('info@example.com', 'Information');
$mail->addCC('cc@example.com');
$mail->addBCC('bcc@example.com');
$mail->addAttachment('/var/tmp/file.tar.gz'); // Add attachments
$mail->addAttachment('/tmp/image.jpg', 'new.jpg'); // Optio
nal name
$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>';
$mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';
if(!$mail->send()) {
echo 'Message could not be sent.';
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
echo 'Message has been sent';
}
```
You'll find plenty more to play with in the [examples](examples/) folder.
That's it. You should now be ready to use PHPMailer!
## Localization
PHPMailer defaults to English, but in the [language](language/) folder you'll find numerous (46 at the time of writing!) translations for PHPMailer error messages that you may encounter. Their filenames co
ntain [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:
```php
// To load the French version
$mail->setLanguage('fr', '/optional/path/to/language/directory/');
```
