PHPMailer using Gmail SMTP server can be set up easily with this quick guide by our experts.  

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team is ready to help customers with PHPMailer using Gmail SMTP server.

How to send an email with PHPMailer using Gmail SMTP server

PHPMailer is popular over simple mail as it offers a lot of additional functionality like attachments, encryption, authentication, and so on. Furthermore, it simplifies the process of sending HTML emails.

Additionally, we don’t need to utilize a local mail server as it contains an integrated SMTP client. It’s useful for platforms that don’t have a local mail server, such as Pantheon.

Although there are other alternative options, our Support Techs recommend PHPMailer over them. Today, we are going to take a look at how we can use PHPMailer to send emails via Gmail SMTP.

Before we proceed, here are a few of the limitations of Gmail SMTP servers and how to deal with them:

• The number of recipients in a single email and the number of emails that can be sent each day are set to 500 emails and 500 recipients respectively in Gmail. There is no way to exceed this restriction. However, we can send more than these limits, by using a third-party email distribution platform.
• If we surpass the above threshold, we will not be able to send messages for the upcoming 24 hours. We can resume sending emails after the counter resets after the temporary suspension period ends.
• Third-party apps/codes can not send emails using our Gmail account by default. Fortunately, we can alter this by modifying a few settings as seen in the next section.

How to enable Third-party Apps/Code Email Sending in Gmail

1. Begin by heading to the Google Account Security Settings.
2. Then, ensure the 2-Step Verification is disabled.
3. Next, turn the Less Secure App setting to ON.
4. After that, create an app password for the application or device. Google may ask us to perform this additional step as part of the sign-in process for security reasons.
5. Finally, allow access to our Google account via the new device/app.

How to install PHPMailer

Our Support Techs offer two ways to install PHPMailer:

• Via Composer:

  In this method, add the following code to the composer.json:

  "phpmailer/phpmailer": "^6.2"
• Via Terminal:

  Here, execute the following command to install PHPMailer:

  composer require phpmailer/phpmailer

Alternatively, we can also download PHPMailer from this link and copy the contents of the folder to one of the PHP configuration’s include_path directories.

After that, add the following code to the PHP file to manually load each class file:

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';

Sample PHP code to send email via Gmail SMTP

Here is the code we need to add to the PHP file via which we want to send the email. Our Support Techs would like to point out that we have to change the values as per our domain and usernames.

//Import PHPMailer classes into the global namespace
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\SMTP;
use PHPMailer\PHPMailer\Exception;

require ‘vendor/autoload.php’;

$mail = new PHPMailer(true);
$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->Mailer = “smtp”;

try {
$mail->SMTPDebug = 1;
$mail->SMTPAuth = TRUE;
$mail->SMTPSecure = “tls”;
$mail->Port = 587;
$mail->Host = “smtp.gmail.com”;
$mail->Username = “your-email@gmail.com”;
$mail->Password = “your-gmail-password”;

//Recipients
$mail->IsHTML(true);
$mail->AddAddress(“recipient@domain”, “recipient-name”);
$mail->SetFrom(“from@gmail.com”, “from-name”);
$mail->AddReplyTo(“reply-to@domain”, “reply-to-name”);
$mail->AddCC(“cc-recipient@domain”, “cc-recipient-name”);
$mail->Subject = “Test Email sent via Gmail SMTP Server using PHP Mailer”;
$content = “<b>This is a Test Email sent via Gmail SMTP Server using PHP mailer class</b>.”;

//Attachments
$mail->addAttachment(‘/var/tmp/file.tar.gz’); //Add attachments
$mail->addAttachment(‘/tmp/image.jpg’, ‘new.jpg’); //Optional name

//Content
$mail->MsgHTML($content);
if(!$mail->Send()) {
echo “Error while sending Email.”;
var_dump($mail);
} else {
echo “Email sent successfully”;
}
}

With these new changes, we will be able to successfully send an email via Gmail SMTP server using PHPMailer.

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Conclusion

In brief, our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated how to send an email with PHPMailer using Gmail SMTP server