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.
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!
*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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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`.
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 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.
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 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:
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.
Examples of how to use PHPMailer for common scenarios can be found in the [examples](examples/) folder. If you're looking for a good starting point, we recommend you start with [the gmail example](examples/gmail.phps).
There are tips and a troubleshooting guide in the [GitHub wiki](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki). If you're having trouble, this should be the first place you look as it's the most frequently updated.
Complete generated API documentation is [available online](http://phpmailer.github.io/PHPMailer/).
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.
If the documentation doesn't cover what you need, search the [many questions on StackOverflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/phpmailer), and before you ask a question about "SMTP Error: Could not connect to SMTP host.", [read the troubleshooting guide](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting).
If this isn't passing, is there something you can do to help?
## Contributing
Please submit bug reports, suggestions and pull requests to the [GitHub issue tracker](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/issues).
We're particularly interested in fixing edge-cases, expanding test coverage and updating translations.
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:
