Relaying mail with PHP

Relaying mail with PHP

Sending mail through a mail server that requires authentication (A username and password).

This article is when you do NOT want to use your server’s MTA with PHP, and you want to send through an MTA that requieres authentication (A remote mail server)

When sending email from your own MTA with sendmail, PHP can use the mail() function to send such mail by smply passing the mail function some arguments, Even when the MTA is on a different computer that allows you to send mail (By validating your IP), changes can be made to PHP.INI to make the mail function work as needed.

But when you want to automate sending emails from something like a GMAIL account or a Godaddy Mail Server, things are different, You will need to connect to the SMTP server and ask it to relay your mail, for that the server will ask you for Authentication credentials, this tutorial will show you how to send email from a different email provider.

So, to begin with, you will need to download this script that i originally obtained from the open source GPL Coppermine Project, they in turn took the code from the GPL PHPMailer, a small change is required to make this file work.

Click here to download the mail slass scripts

What this script is about to do is exactly what your Outlook or Thunderbird do when you manually send a message from them, this is not a magic solution, the Gmail sending limits still apply, and all other big providers have limits even when you are a paying customer. mail providers need to protect there servers from being labled as spammers, some rules need to be in place.

Also, before you start, you should look carefully at the limits, not only is there a send limit, a large number of bounces will also lock your account in the case of Gmail and others.

In this tutorial we will use the functions in the PHPMailer class “http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/”, it is free GPL software.

but rather than downloading it from PHPMailer’s website, we will take it from within the Coppermine Gallery Software, the file we need is include/mailer.inc.php

a few modifications need to be done, First seach for the string “connect to the smtp server” and add the following lines above it

$host = “ssl://smtp.gmail.com”;
$port = 465;

then search for “function ServerVar”, and right after the opening “function ServerVar {” and before “$superCage = Inspekt::makeSuperCage();” add

return ”;

Now, our mailer script should be ready !

Now, create a new PHP file (sendmymail.php), and within that paste the following code, Fix all names, credentials and email addresses.

require 'mailer.inc.php';
$mail = new cpg_PHPMailer();//this is the name of the class in coppermine
$mail->IsSMTP(); // send via SMTP
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // turn on SMTP authentication
$mail->Username = "username@gmail.com"; // SMTP username
$mail->Password = "password"; // SMTP password
$webmaster_email = "username@doamin.com"; //Reply to this email ID
$email="username@domain.com"; // Recipients email ID
$name="name"; // Recipient's name
$mail->From = $webmaster_email;
$mail->FromName = "Webmaster";
$mail->AddAddress($email,$name);
$mail->AddReplyTo($webmaster_email,"Webmaster");
$mail->WordWrap = 50; // set word wrap
//$mail->AddAttachment("/var/tmp/file.tar.gz"); // If you want to add attachments !
//$mail->AddAttachment("/tmp/image.jpg", "new.jpg"); // If you want to add attachments
$mail->IsHTML(true); // send as HTML
$mail->Subject = "This is the subject";
$mail->Body = "Hi,
This is the HTML BODY "; //HTML Body
$mail->AltBody = "This is the body when user views in plain text format"; //Text Body.
if(!$mail->Send())
{
	print "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
}
else
{
	print "Message has been sent";
}

?>