How do you check php mail function is working or not?

Are you having trouble understanding PHP mail functions and experiencing PHP mail not working? Have you recently swedged to understand how PHP mail works? You’ve come to the right place, as we have demystified most possible problems you could face with non working PHP mail.

Are you a PHP professional, or perhaps a novice who has yet to master the ropes? Irrespective of the circumstance, there is still more to know about any programming language, and there are occasionally materials that will help developers get better. This is one of them!

Our skilled team has gone above and beyond to explain the concept in this topic to assist you in understanding the scope and concept of how PHP mail works, error handling within a PHP mail function, setting it up to work, and sending PHP mail through Gmail. Here we begin our quest to become a better PHP developer.

Your task now is to give it your all and absorb the information you’ve been given.

Contents

• Why Is PHP Mail Not Working?
• Steps in PHP Mail Test
• PHP Mail Error Handling – The Right Way
• Conclusion

The PHP mail[] function allows users to send emails to users by using a script. This function takes three necessary input arguments that define the recipient’s email address, its subject, and the message to be sent as well as two optional parameters which are the headers and parameters.

Moving on with the PHP mail[] function, the general syntax of this function is as follows:

Mail[] can have these parameters inside its brackets: mail[to, subject, message, headers, parameters]

MorParameter values and description are in the table below

Parameter	Description
Required – The following parameters are necessary
to	Receiver, or receivers of the mail
subject	The main topic of the mail. Note: This parameter should not have any newline characters
message	The message to be sent. Note: Each line should be separated by a line feed-LF [n]. Lines should not be more than 70 characters long.
Optional – The following parameters are optional
headers	Headers, such as From, Cc, and Bcc, can be specified. A carriage return line feed CRLF [rn] should be used to separate the extra headers. Note: When sending an email, it must have a From header. This may be configured using this argument or in the php.ini file.
parameters	Used to input extra  or additional parameters

An example of how to you PHP mail[]

Output:

PHP Warning: mail[]: Failed to connect to mailserver at “localhost” port 25, verify your “SMTP” and “smtp_port” setting in php.ini or use ini_set[] in C:UsersPromise NwhatorDocumentsArticlesPHPCodetest.php on line 8

Warning: mail[]: Failed to connect to mailserver at “localhost” port 25, verify your “SMTP” and “smtp_port” setting in php.ini or use ini_set[] in C:UsersPromise NwhatorDocumentsArticlesPHPCodetest.php on line 8

Unable to send email. Please try again.

From the above, you can see the PHP mail function is not working.

For PHP mail to work, it requires a delivery server [SMTP] to send out emails. If you’ve ever sent emails from an application or website while it’s in production, you’re aware of the concern that an email may be exposed to the world.

Are you sure that none of the ‘test’ emails was sent to colleagues or, still, customers? Of course, you may set up and manage a test email server for development purposes, but this is a time-consuming task. Furthermore, the time it takes to examine new test emails might significantly impede your development cycle.

To use PHP mail on your localhost, you require an SMTP[Simple Mail Transfer Protocol]. The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol [SMTP] is a program that allows senders and receivers to send, receive, and redirect outgoing emails. Email is transmitted from one server to another across the Internet via SMTP whenever a mail is sent. In layman’s terms, an SMTP email is just an email sent through the SMTP server. The application I currently use on an SMTP server on my localhost is called PaperCut.

The reason why PHP mail is not working are listed below:

Some email service providers do not allow external recipients through PHP mail functions when not working with the localhost. Firstly, change the recipient [$to] from the code above to a local recipient. Simply saying, the email address to be sent to would be from the server’s domain.

Follow the steps below to send mail from the localhost XAMPP using Gmail:

1. Open your compiler [Visual Studio Code]
2. Locate file path “C:xamppphp” and open the “php.ini” file
3. Locate [mail function] within the file
4. Change the values for the following,
   • SMTP = smtp.gmail.com
   • smtp_port = 587
   • sendmail_from = “Gmail username goes here”@gmail.com
   • sendmail_path = “”C:xamppsendmailsendmail.exe” -t” – Only needed in a Unix environment
5. Then, locate file path C:xamppsendmail and open the sendmail.ini file
6. Locate [sendmail] within the file
7. Change the values for the following,
   • smtp_server = smtp.gmail.com
   • smtp_port = 587
   • error_logfile = error.log [Some of this code may have been commented out, just remove the; character]
   • debug_logfile = debug.log
   • auth_username = “enter Gmail username here”@gmail.com
   • auth_password= “your Gmail password goes here”

After the setup has been completed, run the code below again:

Steps in PHP Mail Test

The script below helps test your hosting to check that you can send emails from PHP-enabled websites with a contact form or something requiring you to send emails to users. The script is used in software, including content management systems [CMS] like WordPress, Wix, Joomla, and the likes.

If you have made adjustments [such as enabling SMTP in PHP settings], this is a fast and straightforward method to ensure the emails are correctly sent.

Create a test script [name the script test.php]  with the following code below: