How do I send emails from a PHP application?

The common ways to send email from a PHP app are:

1) Use a mail library over SMTP

This is the most reliable approach. The most popular library is PHPMailer.

Install with Composer

composer require phpmailer/phpmailer

Example with SMTP

use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer(true);

try {
    $mail->isSMTP();
    $mail->Host = 'smtp.example.com';
    $mail->SMTPAuth = true;
    $mail->Username = 'your_username';
    $mail->Password = 'your_password';
    $mail->SMTPSecure = PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_STARTTLS; // or PHPMailer::ENCRYPTION_SMTPS
    $mail->Port = 587;

    $mail->setFrom('from@example.com', 'My App');
    $mail->addAddress('to@example.com', 'Recipient Name');

    $mail->isHTML(true);
    $mail->Subject = 'Hello from PHP';
    $mail->Body    = '<p>This is a test email.</p>';
    $mail->AltBody = 'This is a test email.';

    $mail->send();
    echo 'Message sent';
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "Message could not be sent. Mailer Error: {$mail->ErrorInfo}";
}

---

2) Use PHP’s built-in mail() function

This is simpler, but less reliable and often not recommended for production.

$to = 'user@example.com';
$subject = 'Test email';
$message = 'Hello from PHP';
$headers = 'From: webmaster@example.com' . "\r\n" .
           'Reply-To: webmaster@example.com' . "\r\n" .
           'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Downsides of mail()

• Depends on server mail configuration
• Often ends up in spam
• Harder to debug
• No built-in authentication/TLS handling

---

3) Use a transactional email service

For apps, this is often best:

• SendGrid
• Mailgun
• Amazon SES
• Postmark

These services usually provide:

• Better deliverability
• SMTP or HTTP APIs
• Bounce/complaint tracking
• Templates and logs

---

Best practice

For most applications:

• Use PHPMailer or Symfony Mailer
• Send via SMTP
• Use a real email provider
• Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your domain

If you want, I can show you:

1. a PHPMailer example with Gmail/SMTP,
2. how to send HTML emails with attachments, or
3. how to use Symfony Mailer instead.