Changing form php sendmail to SMTP?

Question

We created this contact form a long time ago, but we have recently had issues with our sendmail, now i need to change this to use SMTP and that i haven't done before. Is it much work or just a matter of changing few lines? Any tips are welcome.

You can see our whole script here, it's very simple...

<?php
    if(!$_POST) exit;

    function tommus_email_validate($email) {
        return filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) && preg_match('/@.+\./', $email);
    }

    $name = $_POST['name']; $email = $_POST['email']; $phone = $_POST['phone']; $comments = $_POST['comments'];

    if(trim($name) == '') {
        exit('<div class="error_message">You must enter your name.</div>');
    } else if(trim($name) == 'Name') {
        exit('<div class="error_message">You must enter your name.</div>');
    } else if(trim($email) == '') {
        exit('<div class="error_message">Please enter a valid email address.</div>');
    } else if(!tommus_email_validate($email)) {
        exit('<div class="error_message">You have entered an invalid e-mail address.</div>');
    } else if(trim($comments) == 'Tell us what you think!') {
        exit('<div class="error_message">Please enter your message.</div>');
    } else if(trim($comments) == '') {
        exit('<div class="error_message">Please enter your message.</div>');
    } else if( strpos($comments, 'href') !== false ) {
        exit('<div class="error_message">Please leave links as plain text.</div>');
    } else if( strpos($comments, '[url') !== false ) {
        exit('<div class="error_message">Please leave links as plain text.</div>');
    } if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()) { $comments = stripslashes($comments); }    

    $address = 'hello@basicagency.com';

    $e_subject = 'You\'ve been contacted by ' . $name . '.';

    $e_body = "You have been contacted by $name from your contact form, their additional message is as follows." . "\r\n" . "\r\n";
    $e_content = "\"$comments\"" . "\r\n" . "\r\n";
    $e_reply = "You can contact $name via email, $email (or by phone if supplied: $phone)";    

    $msg = wordwrap( $e_body . $e_content . $e_reply, 70 );

    $headers = "From: $email" . "\r\n";
    $headers .= "Reply-To: $email" . "\r\n";
    $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
    $headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" . "\r\n";
    $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" . "\r\n";

    if(mail($address, $e_subject, $msg, $headers)) {
        echo "<fieldset><div id='success_page'><p>Thank you $name, your message has been submitted to us.</p></div></fieldset>";
    }

Are you trying to use your own SMTP server to send these mails that is hosted on another machine? I use postfix to push my e-mail and just use the [relayhost](http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#relayhost) to direct the mail to there. — Matt D., Mar 16 '16 at 15:38
I do have my own SMTP server, the issue is changing the current script above to use SMTP and not sendmail as it is now. — Jack Johnson, Mar 25 '16 at 22:58

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 25 '16 at 23:39

You can use a package for handling e-mails, such as PHPMailer, just use the included methods to build your message, instead of the $headers variable. Once you have downloaded PHPMailer and have it somewhere accessable by your script, replace this:

$headers = "From: $email" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: $email" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" . "\r\n";

if(mail($address, $e_subject, $msg, $headers)) {
    echo "<fieldset><div id='success_page'><p>Thank you $name, your message has been submitted to us.</p></div></fieldset>";
}

with something like this:

require '/path/to/PHPMailer/PHPMailerAutoload.php';
$mail = new PHPMailer;
$mail->isSMTP();

// SMTP server details 
$mail->Host = "mail.example.com";
$mail->Port = 25;
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
$mail->Username = "yourname@example.com";
$mail->Password = "yourpassword";

// message details 
$mail->setFrom($email, $email);
$mail->addReplyTo($email, $email);
$mail->addAddress($address, $address);
$mail->Subject = $e_subject;
$mail->Body = $msg;

// send 
if($mail->send()) {
    echo "<fieldset><div id='success_page'><p>Thank you $name, your message has been submitted to us.</p></div></fieldset>";
}
else{
    echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
}

Changing form php sendmail to SMTP?

1 Answers1