I’m trying to get email functionality working on my local development environment. I have WAMP server running on my machine and I want to send emails through PHP’s mail() function using my Gmail account.
I know Gmail uses smtp.gmail.com as the SMTP server with port 465 for SSL connection. However, I’m not sure what configuration changes I need to make in WAMP to get this working properly.
Can someone guide me through the steps to configure WAMP so that I can successfully send emails using the mail() function with Gmail’s SMTP settings? I’ve been stuck on this for a while and any help would be appreciated.
Skip the php.ini tweaks for Gmail - Google’s security changes killed that approach. Just install PHPMailer through Composer instead. You’ll have emails working in minutes without wrestling with WAMP configs that won’t authenticate anyway.
You can modify your php.ini file in WAMP to set up SMTP, but honestly it’s a pain and rarely works with Gmail anymore. Their security restrictions make it almost impossible. I wasted hours trying to get the built-in mail() function working with Gmail before I gave up. The problem is mail() doesn’t support Gmail’s authentication protocols. Even with proper SMTP settings in php.ini, you’ll hit authentication errors or your messages get blocked. Skip the native mail() function entirely and just use SwiftMailer or PHPMailer instead. These libraries actually handle SSL/TLS and OAuth authentication properly, unlike the basic mail() function.
I faced a similar issue when setting up email functionality in my local WAMP server. The native mail() function has limitations with Gmail since it doesn’t handle SMTP authentication required by Gmail. Instead, I recommend using PHPMailer, as it simplifies the process. Make sure to enable “Less secure app access” in your Google account settings, or generate an app password if two-factor authentication is enabled. Configure PHPMailer to connect to smtp.gmail.com on port 587 with STARTTLS for a successful setup.