PHPMailer

PHPMailer

Original author(s)	Brent R. Matzelle[1][2]
Developer(s)	(2001-2003) Brent R. Matzelle (2004-2009) Andy Prevost.[3][4] (2010-2012) Jim Jagielski.[5] (2004- ) Marcus Bointon [6]
Initial release	2001
Stable release	5.2.13 / 14 September 2015
Written in	PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	47 languages
License	LGPL
Website	github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

Blue arrows can be implemented using SMTP variations.

PHPMailer is a code library to send (transport) emails safely ^[7] and easily via PHP code from a web server (MUA to the MSA server).

Sending emails directly by PHP code requires a high-level familiarity to SMTP standard protocol (RFC 821,^[8] RFC 2821^[9] and RFC 5321^[10]) and related issues (such as Carriage return) and vulnerabilities about Email injection for spamming. From 2001 up to 2013 PHPMailer is one of the popular ^[11][12] 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.^[1]
• 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.^[13]
• 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^[14][15] 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

1. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer#history
2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/bmatzelle
3. codeworxtech
4. worxware
5. jimjag
6. coolbru
7. It is involved in sending emails safely without Email injection risk (not the html purification which is to prevent XSS)
8. RFC821 obsoleted by RFC2821
9. RFC2821 obsoleted by RFC5321
10. RFC5321
11. Worxware claims 9 million MUA use PHPMailer: Frozen web page for the update Dec2013 on phpmailer.worxware.com
12. "PHPMailer for e-mail sending support" in the requirements of Mantis Bug Tracker
13. https://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/phpmailer/
14. http://phpmailer.worxware.com
15. Frozen update

Notes

• http://phpmailer.worxware.com/
• https://github.com/Synchro/PHPMailer

External links

• PHPMailer on GitHub