Girish Mahajan (Editor)

PHPMailer

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Original author(s)
  
Brent R. Matzelle

Operating system
  
Cross-platform

Written in
  
PHP

PHPMailer

Developer(s)
  
(2001-2003) Brent R. Matzelle (2004-2009) Andy Prevost. (2010-2012) Jim Jagielski. (2004- ) Marcus Bointon

Initial release
  
2001; 16 years ago (2001)

Stable release
  
5.2.22 / 9 January 2017; 2 months ago (2017-01-09)

PHPMailer is a code library to send (transport) emails safely and easily via PHP code from a web server (MUA to the MSA server).

Contents

Sending emails directly by PHP code requires a high-level familiarity to SMTP standard protocol (RFC 821, RFC 2821 and RFC 5321) and related issues (such as Carriage return) and vulnerabilities about Email injection for spamming. From 2001 PHPMailer is one of the popular solutions for these matters on PHP.

Features

Partial list of features:

  • Plain text, HTML and multipart batched files
  • SSL and TLS (Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security)
  • SMTP, Qmail, POP3
  • Debugging system
  • PHP sendmail and mail methods
  • IDN
  • DKIM

    • History

  • PHPMailer was originally written in 2001 by Brent R. Matzelle as a SourceForge project.
  • Marcus Bointon (coolbru on sourceforge) and Andy Prevost (codeworxtech) took over the project in 2004.
  • Became an Apache incubator project on Google Code in 2010, managed by Jim Jagielski.
  • Marcus created his fork on GitHub.
  • Jim and Marcus decide to join forces and use GitHub as the canonical and official repo for PHPMailer.
  • PHPMailer moved to the PHPMailer organisation on GitHub.

    • Popularity

    Worx International Inc claimed in 2009 that: "PHPMailer continues to be the world's most popular transport class, with an estimated 9 million users worldwide. Downloads continue at a significant pace daily." (A user means a PHP code (MUA user)).

    PHPMailer sends an SMTP extension command with the sent emails as below which can be used to get the usage report of PHPMailer on the ESPs (Email Service Providers):

    X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.2.13 (https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)

    This SMTP header may differ for different versions of PHPMailer, and can also be suppressed or modified by PHP code.

    References

    PHPMailer Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA