Sending emails with PHP

You can use PHP to send emails quite easily. All you have to do is install two modules and you are ready. You have to have php-pear installed on your machine. If it is not, then install it. Then you can install the needed modules Mail and Net_SMTP with


sudo pear install --alldeps Mail


It will also install Net_Socket and Auth_SASL which are not necessary but you may need them. For basic email send process Mail and Net_SMTP are sufficient. The sample code below shows how you can create a function that sends a message using SMTP server that accepts SSL connections.

<?php

require_once "Mail.php";
function general_email($message_subject,$message_body,$send_to) {
	$from = "Your Name ";
	$message = "DATE: ".date("l d.m.Y")." TIME: ".date("h:i:s A")."\r\n";
	$message .= utf8_decode($message_body);
	$host = "ssl://smtp.yourserver.com";
	$port = "465";
	$username = "your_username";
	$password = "your_password";
	$headers = array ('From' => $from,
	   'To' => $send_to,
	   'Subject' => $message_subject);
	 $smtp = Mail::factory('smtp',
	   array ('host' => $host,
	     'port' => $port,
	     'auth' => true,
	     'username' => $username,
	     'password' => $password));
	 
	 $mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $message_body);
	 
	 if (PEAR::isError($mail)) {
	   return("
" . $mail->getMessage() . "
");
	  } else {
	   return("
Message successfully sent!
");
	  }
}

$recipient= "tux@antarctica.org";
$subject = "Test email";
$message = "This is a test. Do not reply.";
general_email($subject,$message,$recipient);

}

?>