I’m trying to get email functionality working on my local development setup
I have WAMP 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 their SMTP server with port 465 for SSL connections.
What specific configuration changes do I need to make in WAMP to enable this? I’ve been searching around but I’m not sure which files to edit or what exact settings to put in there.
Any help would be really appreciated!
I fought with this for weeks before figuring it out. PHP’s mail() function doesn’t support SMTP authentication - which Gmail needs. You’ve got to install something like Sendmail for Windows or hMailServer to bridge between PHP and Gmail’s servers. I went with hMailServer since it’s easier to set up. Install it, configure it to connect to Gmail with your credentials, then tell php.ini to use localhost as the SMTP server. hMailServer handles the Gmail auth while PHP just sends to your local server. Way more reliable than wrestling with the native mail() function.
yea, i agree with that! using PHPMailer makes it way easier to manage emails and avoid all those errors with mail(). just make sure to handle OAuth2 if you’re going to use Gmail, because it can be tricky otherwise.
To set up your Gmail SMTP with PHP’s mail() function on WAMP, you’ll need to make specific changes in your php.ini file. Locate the [mail function] section and set smtp = smtp.gmail.com and smtp_port = 587. Don’t forget to define your Gmail credentials by adding them to auth_username and auth_password. Be aware that Gmail requires enabling ‘less secure apps’ for this to work, which can pose security risks. Also, if you have two-factor authentication, consider using an app password instead to avoid authentication issues.