Jacmoe's Cyber Soapbox

How do you send emails using plain PHP mail on WAMP on Windows?

Normally, PHP mail works by using Sendmail which is installed on *nixes, so it doesn't work on a Windows box. However, normally we just rewrite our code to using a SMTP server, but what about when we really don't want to - or can't - modify third-party code?

Fake sendmail to the rescue!

Prequisites

Make sure that you get the following:

• Wampserver - or any Windows based LAMP stack
• Fake Sendmail

Fake sendmail - sendmail.exe - emulates Sendmails "-t" option to send emails and it needs a working SMTP configuration. For this example we use a Gmail account, but you can use any compatible SMTP server.

If you've installed Wampserver in C:\wamp, unzip the contents of the fake sendmail archive into C:\wamp\sendmail. Otherwise adjust accordingly.

Configuration

Sendmail

Now, we need to edit C:\wamp\sendmail\sendmail.ini:

smtp_server=smtp.gmail.com
smtp_port=465
auth_username=user@gmail.com
auth_password=your_password

The above will work against a Gmail account. :)

PHP

Now we need to edit php.ini and set sendmail_path:

sendmail_path = "C:\wamp\sendmail\sendmail.exe -t"

Now, restart Apache, and that is basically all you need to do.

Sending a test email

Now we can't wait to test if it works!

Create a php script, like this:

<?php
$to      = 'some@email.here';
$subject = 'Fake sendmail test';
$message = 'If we can read this, it means that our fake Sendmail setup works!';
$headers = 'From: your@email.here' . "\r\n" .
    'Reply-To: your@email.here' . "\r\n" .
    'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

if(mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)) {
    echo 'Email sent successfully!';
} else {
    die('Failure: Email was not sent!');
}

Put it in your www directory and run it.

If it worked successfully - you should receive an email from yourself shortly - you can now use the 'vanilla' PHP mail function. And you don't need to modify existing code to work on non-sendmail platforms.