Sending email with PHP from an SMTP server

Question

$from = "[email protected]";
$headers = "From:" . $from;
echo mail ("[email protected]" ,"testmailfunction" , "Oj",$headers);

I have trouble sending email in PHP. I get an error: SMTP server response: 530 SMTP authentication is required.

I was under the impression that you can send email without SMTP to verify. I know that this mail will propably get filtered out, but that doesn't matter right now.

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/smtp
SMTP = localhost
; http://php.net/smtp-port
smtp_port = 25

; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/sendmail-from
sendmail_from = [email protected]

This is the setup in the php.ini file. How should I set up SMTP? Are there any SMTP servers that require no verification or must I setup a server myself?

Answer 1

When you are sending an e-mail through a server that requires SMTP Auth, you really need to specify it, and set the host, username and password (and maybe the port if it is not the default one - 25).

For example, I usually use PHPMailer with similar settings to this ones:

$mail = new PHPMailer();

// Settings
$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';

$mail->Host       = "mail.example.com";    // SMTP server example
$mail->SMTPDebug  = 0;                     // enables SMTP debug information (for testing)
$mail->SMTPAuth   = true;                  // enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Port       = 25;                    // set the SMTP port for the GMAIL server
$mail->Username   = "username";            // SMTP account username example
$mail->Password   = "password";            // SMTP account password example

// Content
$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';

$mail->send();

You can find more about PHPMailer here: https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer