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   1  ![PHPMailer](https://raw.github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/master/examples/images/phpmailer.png)
   2  
   3  # PHPMailer - A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP
   4  
   5  Build status: [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.svg)](https://travis-ci.org/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)
   6  [![Scrutinizer Quality Score](https://scrutinizer-ci.com/g/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/badges/quality-score.png?s=3758e21d279becdf847a557a56a3ed16dfec9d5d)](https://scrutinizer-ci.com/g/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/)
   7  [![Code Coverage](https://scrutinizer-ci.com/g/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/badges/coverage.png?s=3fe6ca5fe8cd2cdf96285756e42932f7ca256962)](https://scrutinizer-ci.com/g/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/)
   8  
   9  ## Class Features
  10  
  11  - Probably the world's most popular code for sending email from PHP!
  12  - Used by many open-source projects: Drupal, SugarCRM, Yii, Joomla! and many more
  13  - Integrated SMTP support - send without a local mail server
  14  - Send emails with multiple TOs, CCs, BCCs and REPLY-TOs
  15  - Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email
  16  - Support for UTF-8 content and 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings
  17  - SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, NTLM and CRAM-MD5 mechanisms over SSL and TLS transports
  18  - Native language support
  19  - DKIM and S/MIME signing support
  20  - Compatible with PHP 5.0 and later
  21  - Much more!
  22  
  23  ## Why you might need it
  24  
  25  Many PHP developers utilize email in their code. The only 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-based emails and attachments.
  26  
  27  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 online that uses the mail() function directly is just plain wrong!
  28  *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, eZcomponents etc.
  29  
  30  The PHP mail() function usually sends via a local mail server, typically fronted 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.
  31  
  32  ## License
  33  
  34  This software is licenced under the [LGPL 2.1](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html). Please read LICENSE for information on the
  35  software availability and distribution.
  36  
  37  ## Installation & loading
  38  
  39  PHPMailer is available via [Composer/Packagist](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer). Alternatively, just copy the contents of the PHPMailer folder into somewhere 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.
  40  
  41  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 framework'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.
  42  PHPMailer does *not* declare a namespace because namespaces were only introduced in PHP 5.3.
  43  
  44  ### Minimal installation
  45  
  46  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 [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-only errors. You may need the additional classes in the [extras](extras/) folder if you are using those features, including NTLM authentication, advanced HTML-to-text conversion and ics generation.
  47  
  48  ## A Simple Example
  49  
  50  ```php
  51  <?php
  52  require 'PHPMailerAutoload.php';
  53  
  54  $mail = new PHPMailer;
  55  
  56  //$mail->SMTPDebug = 3;                               // Enable verbose debug output
  57  
  58  $mail->isSMTP();                                      // Set mailer to use SMTP
  59  $mail->Host = 'smtp1.example.com;smtp2.example.com';  // Specify main and backup SMTP servers
  60  $mail->SMTPAuth = true;                               // Enable SMTP authentication
  61  $mail->Username = '[email protected]';                 // SMTP username
  62  $mail->Password = 'secret';                           // SMTP password
  63  $mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';                            // Enable TLS encryption, `ssl` also accepted
  64  $mail->Port = 587;                                    // TCP port to connect to
  65  
  66  $mail->From = '[email protected]';
  67  $mail->FromName = 'Mailer';
  68  $mail->addAddress('[email protected]', 'Joe User');     // Add a recipient
  69  $mail->addAddress('[email protected]');               // Name is optional
  70  $mail->addReplyTo('[email protected]', 'Information');
  71  $mail->addCC('[email protected]');
  72  $mail->addBCC('[email protected]');
  73  
  74  $mail->WordWrap = 50;                                 // Set word wrap to 50 characters
  75  $mail->addAttachment('/var/tmp/file.tar.gz');         // Add attachments
  76  $mail->addAttachment('/tmp/image.jpg', 'new.jpg');    // Optional name
  77  $mail->isHTML(true);                                  // Set email format to HTML
  78  
  79  $mail->Subject = 'Here is the subject';
  80  $mail->Body    = 'This is the HTML message body <b>in bold!</b>';
  81  $mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';
  82  
  83  if(!$mail->send()) {
  84      echo 'Message could not be sent.';
  85      echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
  86  } else {
  87      echo 'Message has been sent';
  88  }
  89  ```
  90  
  91  You'll find plenty more to play with in the [examples](examples/) folder.
  92  
  93  That's it. You should now be ready to use PHPMailer!
  94  
  95  ## Localization
  96  PHPMailer defaults to English, but in the [language](language/) folder you'll find numerous (39 at the time of writing) 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:
  97  
  98  ```php
  99  // To load the French version
 100  $mail->setLanguage('fr', '/optional/path/to/language/directory/');
 101  ```
 102  
 103  We welcome corrections and new languages - if you're looking for corrections to do, run the [phpmailerLangTest.php](test/phpmailerLangTest.php) script in the tests folder and it will show any missing translations.
 104  
 105  ## Documentation
 106  
 107  Generated documentation is [available online](http://phpmailer.github.io/PHPMailer/).
 108  
 109  You'll find some basic user-level docs in the [docs](docs/) folder, and you can generate complete API-level documentation using the [generatedocs.sh](docs/generatedocs.sh) shell script in the docs folder, though you'll need to install [PHPDocumentor](http://www.phpdoc.org) first. You may find [the unit tests](test/phpmailerTest.php) a good source of how to do various operations such as encryption.
 110  
 111  ## Tests
 112  
 113  There is a PHPUnit test script in the [test](test/) folder.
 114  
 115  Build status: [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.svg)](https://travis-ci.org/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)
 116  
 117  If this isn't passing, is there something you can do to help?
 118  
 119  ## Contributing
 120  
 121  Please submit bug reports, suggestions and pull requests to the [GitHub issue tracker](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/issues).
 122  
 123  We're particularly interested in fixing edge-cases, expanding test coverage and updating translations.
 124  
 125  With 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:
 126  
 127  `git remote set-url upstream https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.git`
 128  
 129  Please *don't* use the SourceForge or Google Code projects any more.
 130  
 131  ## Changelog
 132  
 133  See [changelog](changelog.md).
 134  
 135  ## History
 136  - PHPMailer was originally written in 2001 by Brent R. Matzelle as a [SourceForge project](http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer/).
 137  - Marcus Bointon (coolbru on SF) and Andy Prevost (codeworxtech) took over the project in 2004.
 138  - Became an Apache incubator project on Google Code in 2010, managed by Jim Jagielski.
 139  - Marcus created his fork on [GitHub](https://github.com/Synchro/PHPMailer).
 140  - Jim and Marcus decide to join forces and use GitHub as the canonical and official repo for PHPMailer.
 141  - PHPMailer moves to the [PHPMailer organisation](https://github.com/PHPMailer) on GitHub.
 142  
 143  ### What's changed since moving from SourceForge?
 144  - Official successor to the SourceForge and Google Code projects.
 145  - Test suite.
 146  - Continuous integration with Travis-CI.
 147  - Composer support.
 148  - Public development.
 149  - Additional languages and language strings.
 150  - CRAM-MD5 authentication support.
 151  - Preserves full repo history of authors, commits and branches from the original SourceForge project.