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# PHPMailer – A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP
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## Features
- Probably the world's most popular code for sending email from PHP!
- Used by many open-source projects: WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, Joomla! and many more
- Integrated SMTP support – send without a local mail server
- Send emails with multiple To, CC, BCC, and Reply-to addresses
- Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email
- Add attachments, including inline
- Support for UTF-8 content and 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings
- SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5, and XOAUTH2 mechanisms over SMTPS and SMTP+STARTTLS transports
- Validates email addresses automatically
- Protects against header injection attacks
- Error messages in over 50 languages!
- DKIM and S/MIME signing support
- Compatible with PHP 5.5 and later, including PHP 8.2
- Namespaced to prevent name clashes
- Much more!
## Why you might need it
Many PHP developers need to send email from their code. The only PHP function that supports this directly is [`mail()`](https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php). However, it does not provide any assistance for making use of popular features such as encryption, authentication, HTML messages, and attachments.
Formatting email correctly is surprisingly difficult. There are myriad overlapping (and conflicting) standards, 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, if not unsafe!
The PHP `mail()` function usually sends via a local mail server, typically fronted by a `sendmail` binary on Linux, BSD, and macOS platforms, however, Windows usually doesn't include a local mail server; PHPMailer's integrated SMTP client allows email sending on all platforms without needing a local mail server. Be aware though, that the `mail()` function should be avoided when possible; it's both faster and [safer](https://exploitbox.io/paper/Pwning-PHP-Mail-Function-For-Fun-And-RCE.html) to use SMTP to localhost.
*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](https://swiftmailer.symfony.com/)
, [Laminas/Mail](https://docs.laminas.dev/laminas-mail/), [ZetaComponents](https://github.com/zetacomponents/Mail), etc.
## License
This software is distributed under the [LGPL 2.1](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html) license, along with the [GPL Cooperation Commitment](https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/). Please read [LICENSE](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/LICENSE) for information on the software availability and distribution.
## Installation & loading
PHPMailer is available on [Packagist](https://packagist.org/packages/phpmailer/phpmailer) (using semantic versioning), and installation via [Composer](https://getcomposer.org) is the recommended way to install PHPMailer. Just add this line to your `composer.json` file:
```json
"phpmailer/phpmailer": "^6.9.1"
```
or run
```sh
composer require phpmailer/phpmailer
```
Note that the `vendor` folder and the `vendor/autoload.php` script are generated by Composer; they are not part of PHPMailer.
If you want to use XOAUTH2 authentication, you will also need to add a dependency on the `league/oauth2-client` and appropriate service adapters package in your `composer.json`, or take a look at
by @decomplexity's [SendOauth2 wrapper](https://github.com/decomplexity/SendOauth2), especially if you're using Microsoft services.
Alternatively, if you're not using Composer, you
can [download PHPMailer as a zip file](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/archive/master.zip), (note that docs and examples are not included in the zip file), then copy the contents of the PHPMailer folder into one of the `include_path` directories specified in your PHP configuration and load each class file manually:
```php
<?php
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;
require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/Exception.php';
require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/PHPMailer.php';
require 'path/to/PHPMailer/src/SMTP.php';
```
If you're not using the `SMTP` class explicitly (you're probably not), you don't need a `use` line for the SMTP class. Even if you're not using exceptions, you do still need to load the `Exception` class as it is used internally.
## Legacy versions
PHPMailer 5.2 (which is compatible with PHP 5.0 — 7.0) is no longer supported, even for security updates. You will find the latest version of 5.2 in the [5.2-stable branch](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/5.2-stable). If you're using PHP 5.5 or later (which you should be), switch to the 6.x releases.
### Upgrading from 5.2
The biggest changes are that source files are now in the `src/` folder, and PHPMailer now declares the namespace `PHPMailer\PHPMailer`. This has several important effects – [read the upgrade guide](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/UPGRADING.md) for more details.
### Minimal installation
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 [src/PHPMailer.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/PHPMailer.php). If you're using SMTP, you'll need [src/SMTP.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/SMTP.php), and if you're using POP-before SMTP (*very* unlikely!), you'll need [src/POP3.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/POP3.php). You can skip the [language](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/language/) folder if you're not showing errors to users and can make do with English-only errors. If you're using XOAUTH2 you will need [src/OAuth.php](https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/tree/master/src/OAuth.php) as well as the Composer dependencies for the services you wish to authenticate with. Really, it's much easier to use Composer!
## A Simple Example
```php
<?php
//Import PHPMailer classes into the global namespace
//These must be at the top of your script, not inside a function
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;
//Load Composer's autoloader
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
//Create an instance; passing `true` enables exceptions
$mail = new PHPMailer(true);
try {
//Server settings
$mail->SMTPDebug = SMTP::DEBUG_SERVER; //Enable verbose debug output
$mail->isSMTP(); //Send using SMTP
$mail->Host = 'smtp.example.com';