PHPMailer


PHPMailer is a code library to send emails safely and easily via PHP code from a web server.
Sending emails directly by PHP code requires a high-level familiarity to SMTP protocol standards and related issues and vulnerabilities about email injection for spamming. Since 2001 PHPMailer has become one of the most popular solutions for these matters on PHP.

Features

Partial list of features:

History

  • PHPMailer was originally written in 2001 by Brent R. Matzelle as a SourceForge project.
  • Andy Prevost took over the project in 2007.
  • Became an Apache incubator project on Google Code in 2010, managed by Jim Jagielski.
  • Marcus Bointon contributed to the project and joined as an admin in July 2012.
  • 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 organization on GitHub.
  • Late 2016, a serious security flaw was discovered in PHPMailer, that had to be patched twice.

Popularity

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

This SMTP header may differ for different versions of PHPMailer, and can also be suppressed or modified by PHP code. It also comes with Integrated SMTP support which means you can send emails without a local mail server.