Comments on: Sending e-mails via SMTP with PHPmailer and Gmail

By: David McLeary

David McLeary — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:25:28 +0000

Hi,

Excellent article. I am often having problems with my shared host being blacklisted through genuine email distribution scripts on the accounts within it and this script looks like an excellent way around that.

Of interest, http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx is a good resource for checking blacklist status if you’re having trouble sending, as I was.

Regards,

David McLeary
Emerging Innovations

By: Olaf

Olaf — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:26:41 +0000

Hi Jeff,

lloyd27’s snippet is just to demonstrate the error handling, it’s not related to the mail function in this tutorial.

The code like described works very well.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:16:38 +0000

Sorry Olaf and lloyd27 my php isn’t fluent. Am I missing something? How is lloyd27’s call to the function attempting to send via gmail? He’s set the parameter $is_gmail to false.

By: Olaf

Olaf — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:54:21 +0000

Nice addition lloyd27, thanks.

By: lloyd27

lloyd27 — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:34:08 +0000

I suggest the function could return true in case of succcess, and the error message in case the email is not sent, so not global variable is used, and the outside code would be something like

if (($error = smtpmailer($to, $from, $name, $subj, $msg, false)) === true)
{
// Everything went fine
}
else
{
echo $error;
}

By: Olaf

Olaf — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:23:09 +0000

hello Chris,

great that you like the tutorial.
You’re right without a SPF record it’s very risky even if you use Google Apps for your domain. check this information from the Google help:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33786

By: Chris Henry

Chris Henry — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:16:52 +0000

Really cool tutorial. The best way to get into the inbox is not send mail from your own server, and let someone else deal with it.

That said, there are plenty of other factors that will will put your email in the spam folder. Reverse PTR, SPF Records, Domain Keys, and various mail headers are things that will still need to be set correctly for your email to make it to the Inbox.

By: Olaf

Olaf — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:38:21 +0000

Hi Alexandr,

that’s right port 465 is needed by Gmail’s SMTP server. In my example script this port is only used for that server. The fall-back example is using the default SMTP Port: 25.

The requirements are related to sending mails via Gmail’s SMTP server.

By: Alexandr

Alexandr — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:13:06 +0000

You have misstype in requirements,
port 465 it is Gmail server port and PHPMailer don’t need to open it on your server. You have set it as server settings in you class configuration.

So you need to verify possibility connections to this port on another server, not your server port.

PS:
port 465 is SMTPs port – secure SMTP

By: Olaf

Olaf — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Just noticed that I forgot to use the Cc option inside the function. I removed it from the example

(this information is for people read the tutorial within the last 12 hours)